Ascendi
by LoquaciousQuark
Summary: Danarius's death springs an unexpected trap, and when Hawke falls to the Fade in Fenris's place, there is only one person in the world who can help: his sister, Varania. An exploration of family, friendship, and the ties that run deeper than blood.
1. Chapter 1

**AN: **For spark-of-jenius, who was one of the winners of my first Tumblr giveaway. I promised 1,000-3,000 words on any subject the winner chose—and then she handed me this prompt, and I knew there was no possible way I'd be able to stay within those parameters.

Her original prompt: _So far the only thing I can come up with is: Danarius traps f!Hawke in the Fade to bring Fenris to him, Fenris has to brave his many issues with the Fade etc. to go get her. No preference for Hawke class, use of Feynriel totally optional. :D If that doesn't spawn any inspiration, I'll try to come up with something else._

This is for you, Jen! I was truly inspired by this idea, and I really hope you enjoy the final product! As always, thanks to the stupendous Jade for her magnificent beta.

Enjoy.

**Warnings: **Canonical character death.

* * *

**Ascendi**

**—**

IF there were dreams to sell,  
What would you buy?  
Some cost a passing bell;  
Some a light sigh,  
That shakes from Life's fresh crown  
Only a rose-leaf down.  
If there were dreams to sell,  
Merry and sad to tell,  
And the crier rang the bell,  
What would you buy?

—_Dream-Pedlary, _Thomas Lovell Beddoes

—

_Prospero_

This thing of darkness I  
acknowledge mine.

—_The Tempest, _Act V Scene 1

—

It is a trap.

It is a trap and it is a _lie, _all of it, every word, and his sister has betrayed him to his master—and his master is—here. Here, in Kirkwall, in the Hanged Man, where Fenris has spent nights past counting at cards with his friends, on the stairs that lead to Varric's rooms, in the same hall Isabela has stumbled through so many evenings, laughing, drunk, her arm around his shoulders.

His master's shoulders in the same space, more stooped than he remembers beneath the silver robes. Thicker. Greyer in the beard and at the temples. _S_omehow after all this time Fenris is _surprised—_and appalled at his own astonishment. He ought to have known—he ought to have—

The voice is the same. The eyes are the same, possessive and piercing: perfectly assured of his own strength, his own mastery of the world and the slave before him. His master's _smile_ and the walls of the Hanged Man with their lines and grooves, both scored as deep in him as his name, horrifying in the juxtaposition.

But there is no more time. Now there is only the roar of blood in his ears, and the weight of his sword in his hands, and the hiss of lyrium in his veins. Hawke's heat at his back. _We're with you_—a promise he can barely hear—and then battle. Blades on blades—the shriek of magic—his sister's face gone white—

His master's throat in his hand. A lifetime's history in that voice, on that tongue, and lies upon lies upon _lies._

And then blood.

And then nothing but _words_.

—

"_No_," Fenris snarls. Varania flinches away, eyes huge.

"She's your sister," Hawke says, her hands open, pleading. There is no laughter in her voice now. "Fenris, this is your family!"

The flesh of his sister's throat whitens where he grips it. "She brought Danarius to Kirkwall! To bring _me _back as his slave!"

"Danarius is dead!"

_"As she should be_," Fenris spits, and Varania's hand closes around his wrist in blind panic. Her fingers are so slight and slender, no strength in them at all—a mage's hand.

His mother's hand—

"Please," she says, "Leto."

The word hits him in the chest like a hammer. He remembers: a courtyard, dirt between his toes, a woman's back as she pins linens to a line, the white sheets fluttering in the wind to give him a glimpse of red hair and a brighter smile. _Leto!_

His hand loosens despite himself. Varania's eyes are fixed on his and his traitorous heart wrenches at the grief there, the fear, the old and bitter rage that mirrors his own so well. She pulls away once, gingerly, and then again, and the second time the coarse fabric of her collar slips free from his grasp. He does not—reach for her again.

Fenris cannot look at her. She edges around him like a skittish animal, never dropping her gaze; when she is out of his reach she moves faster, retreating behind Hawke who watches him with frank anxiety. Hawke, who commands him even here, because despite his years of freedom he still cannot see the truth for the lies.

"Get out," he says, rough as the rock-choked Coast.

"Fenris," Hawke says, just as low, and abruptly he wants to touch her, to feel her hands on him and remember that he is not a ghost. But he can't—_bear _that, not like this when he is nothing more than brittle glass, and instead he drops his eyes to the place where his master lies dead and opened at his feet. Bleeding, too; Fenris's toes are stained with it around the nails. He lifts one foot, unsettled at the clammy stick, and there is a glint—

A pendant, gripped in his master's dead hand. The Tevinter sun etched in gold and hammered bronze, a long chain wrapped around each grey finger like a lariat. How many times he has seen this pendant resting above his master's heart—Fenris bends, blindly reaching—

Varania shrieks, "_Don't_!"

Hawke shouts, wordless and terrified—

Magic explodes under his hand in a white burst as blinding as the heart of any sun. A sudden pressure slams upward, immense and implacable, burning his palm as it shoves him back—the lyrium surges like a flood-tide in his skin as glass bottles begin to shatter behind the bar and someone is _screaming_—

A silhouette: slender fingers closing around that terrible light, cupping it with naked magic, hiding it away. A mage's fingers.

Hawke's fingers.

No, he thinks. No, _no_—but the pressure is crushing his chest, staggering him, his hair whipping around his face as if this storm has come to end the world. The light is so bright and growing brighter, searing through him like a flame until his eyes blur with tears; he squeezes them shut and it makes no difference, just as brilliant and just as hard and his thundering heart will burst if this does not end. If he could only _move—_!

And then the sun goes out all at once with the barest sigh. The pressure vanishes with it.

At first there is only shadow. Fenris falters, blind, deaf, stunned by the sudden relief; in slow streaks of color the world resolves again into the soot-stained walls he knows so well, the knotted tables, the blood of his dead master pooled on the wooden floor and made darker with sudden drying. And there, crumpled at his master's feet—

Stricken, Fenris breathes, "_No_."

She lies limp and still, hair spread around her shoulders, the pendant's chain tangled around her nerveless fingers. Her legs have bent beneath her like a doll's; her eyes are half-lidded, staring sightlessly into nothing.

_Hawke_.

—

The next moments come in a white roar.

Reunion would have been enough to shake him. But this, his sister and betrayal and his master and his master's death and _this,_ all at once, all within three-quarters of an hour—it is too much. And now Hawke…

He is on his knees beside her. He thinks he might be speaking; she is so cold, her head lolling away from his trembling hands, but—a _pulse_, and a shallow breath but a _breath, _and she is not dead and he has not killed her with his own history. Arcanum and the trade tongue alike spill free in a nonsense jumble, words tripping at his lips with no meaning and less sense. Abruptly, a hard shove knocks him to the floor; he is up again in an instant, lyrium lighting his snarl, but it is Anders and not a threat, hair loose in his eyes as he presses both glowing hands to Hawke's temples.

So be it. Better this way: Fenris can do nothing for her and he—

And he has a sister.

Fenris has held many hearts in his hands through the years: sick hearts, hearts with soft places, hearts that could not bear the touch of steel and burst too quickly to prolong life. Varania's is smaller than most, but strong, beating against his palm like a bird's wing in high storm. Her lips part in a noiseless sigh; her neck curves as she strains to breathe. Her eyes are very green.

He says, unsteady as wildfire and as implacable, "You will undo this."

Varania sucks in a high, whining breath. "I can't."

"_You will_."

"I can't. I can't. But I—know how." She chokes, swallows, chokes again. "If you kill me, you'll lose her."

"Fenris," says Varric, somewhere behind him, somewhere behind the rapid thudding of his heart in his ears. Behind him—with Hawke—

Varania says, "I tried to warn you."

A hiss slips out between his teeth; his hand tightens, and holds, and—comes free, sliding from his sister's chest unbloodied, the silver tips of his gauntlets fraying the dark-dyed linen of her collar. Varania curls into herself with a thick gasp, her fists pressed to her chest; Fenris steps back, unable to trust his own control, and clenches his hands at his sides. The slightest move—the slightest hint of a threat—

Anders's voice, then, edged with worry. "I don't know what this is. I can't wake her up. I've never seen this before, nothing even _like _this. Justice says there's Fade here, but…_in _her, somehow. I don't understand!"

Fenris glares; Varania holds his eyes, straightening, but pitches her voice for Anders. "There is blood magic in it, mage. That is what the spell was _meant _for."

"I've seen blood magic before. I don't know what this is."

Varania takes a step forward; when Fenris does not stop her she moves to kneel at Hawke's side, turning her back on Fenris, on his anger and his fear. Her hands come to rest over Hawke's heart, between Hawke's half-open eyes, fingertips seeping green light. She says, "Here. And here. Can you feel this?"

"Yes," Anders says, startled, and Fenris lifts his eyes to the soot-stained beams of the Hanged Man's ceiling, struggling to breathe, struggling more to keep a thought in his head that is not terror. The front door to the place opens behind him and he hears Norah curse and Corff begin to shout, hears the tramp of many feet as onlookers and patrons alike begin to filter into the building again. Many voices, quiet and careful and curious. Too many.

"Fenris."

He has killed Hawke. Or—is killing her even now. He should have _known_—

A hand grips his arm and he jerks away, cursing at the burst of lyrium-light that follows. "_Fenris_," says Varric. His eyes are very serious. "We need to move Hawke away from here. Now."

"Of course," he says, the words stones in his mouth, and follows Varric to the place where Hawke lies on the stained floorboards. Too many voices—too many eyes, their weight heavy on his shoulders as he bends and gathers Hawke in his arms, unable to ignore the way she hangs limp, unable to stop the terrible cold fear that curls through his stomach. Anders's worry; Varania's glare. Only fifteen steps to Varric's suite at the top of the stairs. Twenty.

He is going to be sick.

Anders and his sister move swiftly to Hawke's side the moment Fenris has left it. There is something ludicrous in that, an abomination and his—_sister_, perched at either side of a human lying too still in a too-short dwarven bed, magic flickering at her temples and her heart to throw weird reflections over the walls, the fat brass lamp atop the nightstand, the little worktable with crossbow oils and a scattering of copper gears. "Fenris," Varric says again, and by the Maker he is sick to _death _of that _name_—

He collides with Isabela on the stairs. She is barely able to steady them both; once he is on his feet again he hurries past her, ignoring the questions she throws at his back, his eyes dropping away from the worry he can read too plainly in her face. The main hall still shows their massacre, blood sprayed across tables and benches and bodies alike, the more opportunistic of the passersby already rifling through the slavers' pockets for what they might sell. On the other side of the room Norah picks her way through broken tables and bottles, trying to salvage what she can as Corff stares forlornly at a streak of char left across his counter. Fenris watches them without speaking, numb as a sea-stone too battered by waves. Some of the men speak to their friends of their finds. Some of them laugh.

None approach Danarius.

Eventually the guard arrives. Aveline first, Donnic at her shoulder, and six or seven men and women he knows by face if not name; Aveline makes straight for him, and between his anger and his terrible guilt, to hold the weight of her gaze is as difficult as straightening a slave's back. She says, clipped and tense, "Explain."

He does. Her cheeks flush and then pale, mottling the skin behind her freckles, and when he is finished she whirls to bark orders at her guards. They scatter at her command, stopping the onlookers, herding the curious back towards the door—she herself does not move from Danarius's feet, as if to guard it herself against the hands too eager to reach into his purse—and almost without realizing he has been moved Fenris finds himself at a corner table, thrust into a relatively unstained seat beneath a high, dirt-choked window, as Donnic rights another chair for himself.

"Fenris," Donnic says, sitting down, leaning close, "you're breathing rather fast."

"What?" Fenris says stupidly, and all at once the impossible disaster crashes down around him, overwhelming him in its magnitude. His heart races, unsteady in its beating; the room seems abruptly too bright and too _loud, _too crowded with faces he does not know. He covers his face with his fingers and bends forward over his knees. It is—too much. All of this, in so little time, it is too _much—_

Donnic grips his shoulder, a heavy warm hand as grounding as the earth. "Easy, easy. Calm down. The captain's here. I'm here. We can figure this out, right here, together. Easy, my friend. Slow _down_."

If it were anyone else—but it is Donnic, and after some moments Fenris feels the weightless panic behind his eyes begin to recede. He drags his hand down his face, struggling for breath. "Donnic. My—sister."

"Yes."

"She said there was blood magic in the spell that holds Hawke."

Donnic swears. "Can she break it?"

"I don't know. Where is the—do you know the place where Merrill lives?"

"In the alienage, near the vhenadahl. I've patrolled there before."

"Send a guard to bring her here." He swallows, lifts his eyes. "Please."

Donnic nods, calm and sure, and something of that calmness finds its way to Fenris at last. "Consider it done," he says, squeezing Fenris's shoulder. "What else do you need?"

What else—Fenris stares, uncomprehending, then lets out a rough bark of a laugh. "If I knew," he begins.

Donnic nods again as if he understands, though there is a sorrow in his eyes that scrapes under Fenris's skin. "Go upstairs. I'll send Merrill to you when we've found her."

Fenris stands without speaking, perversely grateful to have this choice taken from him. An easy order to follow: go upstairs, where Hawke lies trapped in some foul working of his master's make, his traitor of a sister at her side, a mad abomination at her other. Where there will be nothing for him to fight but memories.

He goes. Aveline still stands guard over Danarius's body, her husband's head bent towards her, her boots stained with drying blood.


	2. Chapter 2

"I can do it," Merrill says. "I can. I swear."

The disdain in his sister's eyes disquiets him. Not that he does not feel it himself, but Fenris _knows _Merrill, knows why _he_ does not—and Varania has known her so little time…

"It is no simple spell," Varania says. "Danarius told me that five magisters sealed a layer each before it was finished."

Merrill does not flinch. "I was to be the Keeper for my people. I know how to walk across the Veil to the Beyond, and how to guide others there, too. Marethari taught me. Before."

"But can you hold the gate?"

"Of course," Merrill says, as if she is surprised at the question.

Varania looks to Fenris, one eyebrow lifted. He gives a short, quick nod; she pauses, then dips her head, and tells Merrill, "That duty is yours, then."

As if it could have gone to another. Fenris snorts, standing, too restless in this room that seems suddenly too small. Not that they have not all been here before, gathered around Varric's great table for nights of Wicked Grace—and most drunk, or worse, besides—but today he cannot bear the closeness of it, and ignoring his sister's eyes and Donnic's concern and Sebastian's furrowed brow, he leaves the council of war in favor of Varric's private room.

The clamor fades, then goes quiet as he closes the door behind him. Isabela sits cross-legged at the foot of Varric's bed, idly braiding a bit of white silk rope between her hands; Hawke's mabari lies curled tightly beside her, his massive head resting atop Hawke's ankles. Hawke has not moved save that someone has taken the trouble to close her eyes. No change. No worse.

He does not wish to speak, and he and Isabela know each other well enough that no words are needed here. Fenris crosses to open the tall, narrow windows that open to the alley behind the tavern, as much to do _something_ as any desire for fresh air. A sunny day, he abruptly realizes, the sky bright and clear with only a tracing of wind, the warmth nearly offensive in the face of his own unease. It's become a dull thing, pulsing at his temples, behind his ribs, constant and unrelenting; in a way it reminds him of the flight south of Tevinter, the same unyielding fear with no promise of an end in sight.

Eventually Isabela rises, stretching, yawning wide enough her jaw cracks. She joins him at the window to lean both elbows on the sill, the bit of braided rope nowhere in sight. "Seems like there's trouble ahead."

Fenris snorts. "Something of the kind."

"I heard enough of that discussion to worry. She's trapped in the Fade?"

His fingers dig into the sill. "The pendant was enchanted. A complicated spell, with blood magic, meant to…" The words are harder to force out than he expects. "To return me to…compliance."

"And your sister's going to help break it."

"Yes."

"Mm. You know she's just as likely to stab you in the back all over again."

He knows. "Merrill does not have the strength to keep a third safe in the Fade. My sister knows the spell."

"And you know Hawke."

"Just so."

She knows him too well to ask if he is willing. She asks, "Are you afraid?"

"Yes." For her, the truth. Toby whines softly from the foot of the bed.

Isabela hums, blowing a bit of dark hair from her eyes as she leans forward into open air, her fingers lacing together as she looks down the shabby Lowtown alley. She says, quietly, "You've got to bring her back."

Fenris closes his eyes. "I know."

"_You _come back too."

That startles him into opening his eyes again—and Isabela is glaring at him, her face hard. Her fingers have clenched so hard her knuckles have gone white. "I—will try," he offers.

He hesitates, then covers her knotted fingers with his own; she turns her hand over until she has him held by the wrist, by the place where the red cloth knots. "You _will_."

"I will."

—

She gives him a moment of privacy at the end, closing the door behind her to shut away the sound of Varania's voice, Aveline's voice, Anders's voice as they finish the rest of their plans. As if there is anything he can do, here, with Hawke asleep on Varric's bed, trapped by something he can neither see nor fight.

He forces himself to approach. Hawke lies atop the quilts, a knitted throw draped over her bare feet, her hands folded neatly across her stomach: a bier come too early. The pendant's chain still glints with a thin gold light where it tangles around her fingers. Aveline and Isabela have removed most of her armor along with the boots, leaving her only in a thin purple shirt and her dark trousers, slim and pale and—small.

With a sigh, Fenris sits on the edge of the bed. It is a hard thing to see her like this, so silent, without the animation of her hands, without her too-quick smile. A hard thing too to imagine what he will face soon enough in the Fade, in a piece of magic made to break a mind—and the easiest thing in the world to reach out and touch her shoulder, her forehead, the slope of her cheek. Her mouth is straight, unsmiling, her dark hair drawn neatly over one shoulder; her cheeks are cold, her breathing shallow but steady. Not even a flinch when he brushes the pad of his thumb over one eyebrow, gently across her closed eyes. He would like—but has no right. Not yet. Not like this.

He will ask her, when she wakes.

Instead he pulls the throw to her shoulders and bends forward, just for an instant, just enough to touch his forehead to hers. "Wait for me," he breathes. Perhaps he has no right to demand such a thing—but he has done this to her, has trapped her in this last spell of his master's, and neither man nor demon nor his own deep dread of the Fade will keep him from coming for her. After that—after that, he will not think further.

His heart _aches. _

Hawke does not move. Fenris stands and strides to the door, opening it again to the flurry of voices and tense questions and tenser answers in the room beyond. She does not _move_, and he—does not look back.

—

A half-hour later, they are ready.

Fenris kneels at Hawke's right on Varric's thick quilts, his armor gone; Varania kneels at her left. Their right hands lie atop Hawke's, gold lariat loops of the pendant's chain wrapped around their wrists—his dark and callused, marked every knuckle with lyrium, his sister's white and slender and weak. Merrill stands at the foot of the bed, staff in hand, the sharp butt-end of it held six inches from their joined fingers. Everyone else has gathered behind her in a silent, watchful line—but Sebastian has prayed and Anders has explained and Aveline has threatened and Isabela has told him to come back, and there is nothing more to be done. Not for him, not for Varania, not for Hawke.

Nothing left.

"Are you prepared?" Varania asks.

Fenris looks from Hawke's face to hers. Her voice is cold enough, her green eyes so like his eyes hard with determination, with anger and distrust—but there is something of fear there, too, and somehow he thinks that he has seen this look before. "I am," he says.

She seems to catch something of his thoughts and straightens, as if against an accusation. "Then," to Merrill, without turning her head, "do it."

A marble of green light bursts into being at the tip of Merrill's staff. It hovers there a moment, unmoving; then it begins to swell, growing as large as a closed fist, as a beating heart. Narrow streaks of light flash down to the pendant clutched between them, one at first, then another, then many. The lyrium catches fire and Fenris hisses, unable to keep the lines quiescent between the open magic and odd hum that accompanies it, a high vibrating note beyond hearing that prickles his skin and raises the hair on his arms. Varania's teeth are bared; the green light reflects just as brightly in her eyes.

"Brother," she says, a challenge, and the shrieking grows higher, stronger, zipping lightning down his spine. Her red hair has begun to come loose from its knot.

"Sister," he answers, as much threat.

Merrill shouts and drops the staff's end to their joined hands. The sphere of light explodes with a ringing roar; the shadows flicker sharp and stark across Hawke's face.

Then, nothing.

—

Fenris opens his eyes to mist.

Varania stands beside him; the weird gold-grey light of the Fade streaks over her red hair, turning it at once brighter and more unreal than its color in the waking world. She blinks, sucks in an wavering breath, and glances at him—and the look that glints in her eyes is enough that he pulls his hand from hers, turning from his sister's worry to the more pressing concern of this new unsteady world around them.

Fenris fears the Fade. He knows himself enough to admit it. It is not only the eerie stretching of land and mist alike at the corners of his eyes, or the sense that the ground might give way at any moment to the horrible pressure of the Black City in the distant sky, nor even the sense of whispers just past the discerning of words. Rather, it is the knowledge of his own impotence here, a test failed once already, a demon's promise more precious to him than Hawke's life.

Once, he tells himself. No more.

"There," Varania says.

Fenris turns, ignoring the shudder down his spine at the odd echo of his sister's voice. In the distance rises a towering spire, height impossible to judge across the shivering mists. Even without a sun it shines gold and silver and gleaming, windowless, fantastically-etched and -molded walls tapering to a piercing tip. Not a Circle's tower—the architecture of it too wild for that, even for Tevinter—no mark of Ferelden either, though he knows that style only from Hawke's descriptions. He cannot make out the designs from this distance; he cannot check his noise of frustration. "We'll never reach it."

"Brother," says Varania, faintly mocking, "you stand in the Fade with a mage."

Her hand tucks into his elbow before he can speak; then the world _lurches _beneath his feet and he staggers forward, gasping, blinded by gold mists—and his palms slam against something too solid for dreams.

A door. A great, ornately-carved door, twice his height and three times as wide, the gate to the tower.

"Do _not_," Fenris starts, beyond fury. "Never—without a word—never again."

Varania's face is a mask. "Of course, brother."

Fenris snarls, wordless and hot; his gauntleted fingers clench into the door and relax again, scarring the wood with their metal tips. How curious, that such a little thing would hold true, even here. He looks up—and startles at his own face, etched in gold just above the door, turned in profile to the mists. And beside that—_him_—is Carver in full armor, sword outstretched in a thin-etched silver stripe, and Merrill laughing at his side, and Isabela, and Sebastian looking on with a lovely woman Fenris does not know. And then him again, shouting at Anders, Aveline between them; Aveline with her arm over Isabela's shoulder, Merrill peering at Varric from the low branches of an apple tree. All of them and more, Leandra, Meredith, Jethann, Thrask, Sandal, more that he cannot name—scattered in a dozen poses, a hundred, carved around the tower in a great unending frieze that stretches from earth to spire-tip. Just out of his vision a hand clenches—an eye blinks—and when he looks, there is no movement. He licks his lips. "Tell me—tell me what will happen next."

"Five demons have been bound here. Can you feel them? Their anger?"

"No."

"You will. The magisters coaxed their favors with blood magic, with sacrifice. Each promised to break the mind of the soul brought to them." She smiles, private and hard. "The rituals tied them to Danarius's pendant."

Danarius, who is dead. His mind shies from the thought, the concept alien enough that he still cannot quite believe it. "The magisters did not give him this power freely."

"Danarius owned three of them through blackmail and loose secrets; the other two wished to curry favor with a powerful seat in the Senate. They await word in Minrathous of success."

His lip curls. "They will wait too long."

Varania turns, puts one hand flat to the wood that is not wood. "How confident you are, my brother. To think you plan to best five magisters and Danarius's own magic with nothing but a dreamer's sword."

He grasps its hilt and does not draw it. "Real enough, here."

Again, that faint mockery. She gestures at the little knife sheathed at her own waist. "Reality will find you soon enough."

"Keep your portents."

"You risk a great deal to rescue one woman. Should I not be curious?"

"I spared your life to save Hawke," Fenris snaps. "No other reason. We move _now._"

Varania's mouth thins, but she inclines her head and pushes gently on the great wooden door. It swings open silently, into a soft dimness, a simple stone floor with no dust and no sign of life. The floor of the tower is perhaps thirty feet round, not overlarge, with no mark of any of the complex designs outside on the smooth walls that vanish upwards into mist. A stone stairway begins on the wall across; it spirals up and around until it fades from sight, no more than three feet wide, no railing, no end.

Fenris follows it up with his eyes until it disappears behind gold mist; then, he steps forward. Varania follows at his heels without a word. Her eyes burn into the back of his neck.

For several minutes there is no sound but their feet on stone and the wordless whispers at the edge of hearing. For an instant he cannot understand how it has come to this point, in the Fade, his traitor of a sister unwatched at his back, Hawke somewhere he cannot reach. He would like to say—_something, _somehow—Hawke could not have been silent here if she _tried—_but he can think of nothing, and Varania offers no observations of her own to break the quiet. Then, once they have made three full circles, Varania stirs.

"Wait," she says abruptly, and Fenris stops. Varania touches the blank wall, her brow furrowed; as he watches she closes her eyes, puts her palms to stone and _pushes_—and the stone melts away to leave a wooden door, simply made, brass hinges and a whorled brass handle. "There."

He does not understand. "This tower has no space for a room here."

"Leto," she says, and he forces down the crawl under his skin at the word, "this is the _Fade_."

"My name is Fenris."

Disgust passes through her eyes. "Leto is the name our mother gave you. A Seheron name, after our mother's mother's father."

"Stop." Something shimmers in the back of his mind, veiling silk caught in a breeze; he shakes himself, shakes his head, moves back down towards her until he stands one step up from his sister, his hand level with the handle. "Tell me where this door leads."

"The first demon. Have you faced them before?"

Laughter snorts out of him despite himself. "In Kirkwall? Many."

"Not in Kirkwall. In the Fade."

Ah. "…Once." And one failure to his ledger.

Varania's eyes flick to his, but whatever she sees in his face she refrains from comment. Instead she says, "The door will not allow me to pass."

"What?"

"Your friend," she says, her smile something not—bitter, "has a strong mind. Stronger walls. I cannot pass through them."

"Then I will go alone."

She holds his arm. "Remember. These are illusions, tricks made to break the mind of the one they hold. Each surrender she makes is another crack in her defenses. They will own her if you cannot persuade her to deny them."

"Then I will tell her."

"This is a _dream_. She will remake you to fit the worlds they've trapped her in. You," she gestures at his face, "will know. She will not. It will not be so simple as you think."

Fenris hesitates, then nods. "I understand."

"Brother," she adds as he reaches for the handle, and her eyebrow quirks. "_Bona fortuna._"

"_Gratias_," he says, surprised, and goes through the door.


	3. Chapter 3

For a dream, Gamlen's house has been made uncannily true to life. As often as Fenris met Hawke there he has seen the inside only a handful of times—and yet here are the wood slats of the floor too narrow to cover it completely, and the smokestains on the chipped plaster above the hearth, and the faint yet persistent odor of old cheese. Hawke's mother had scrubbed for hours without ridding the apartment of the smell; he remembers her sighing over it more than once.

And Gamlen, sitting at the little desk just inside the door, sorting through a pile of unopened correspondence—and Hawke on the floor, leaning heavily against her sleeping mabari with her outstretched legs crossed at the ankle, her eyes nearly closed.

His heart jumps. She looks—tired, but _well_, and he had not realized until this moment how desperately he has missed her, how frantic he is to _speak_ to her—

"Hello," Hawke murmurs, lazy and pleasant. "What are you doing here, Fenris?"

He looks down. His own hands, though missing the newer scar across his left palm, his own gauntlets, his own armor. Lighter than it has been the last few years, not yet braced and reinforced from the damage it has—will—sustain. But—his.

"Fenris?"

That is enough to shock him from his paralysis. He jerks forward, towards Hawke, but before he has taken three steps he—_slows_, and stops, his feet settling into stillness on the bare wood, his hands falling limp against his sides, his breath slowing, slowing. His mind rages; his body refuses to respond. She watches him without moving, her shoulders lifting and falling with the dog's breath.

"Nobody teaches elves to knock, eh?" Gamlen says. The envelopes in his hand hush softly against each other in time with the dog's faint snores. "Can't keep any of the rubbish out these days."

"Oh, shut up, Gamlen," Hawke tells him. Her eyelids flicker. "You know Fenris. Have we got a job or something?"

His mouth works and works again; slowly, like forcing stones through wet sand, he says, "Wake up, Hawke. It's time to leave."

"She doesn't want to leave. She's worked herself to the bone for her mother and you lot since that bloody ship dumped her on my doorstep, and what has she got to show for it?"

"Nothing," Hawke whispers. What is left of her smile fades.

"Nothing," repeats Gamlen. Now he turns in the chair, arm slung across the back; he does not once look to Fenris. "Nothing to show for it but another night in this hovel."

Fenris seethes. "Lies. These are _lies, _Hawke. You know this is not true."

Her breath comes out in a long sigh. "Can this…can this job wait? Just a little while? I'm…tired, Fenris."

"This is a dream. It isn't _real_."

"No," Gamlen agrees, silencing him. "It isn't. How could it be? You've spent so many months in here with me, girl. Years. Working yourself to the bone, coming home bloody and beaten, sleeping on a thin stained little mattress when you can, when the cats aren't yowling and the neighbors aren't screaming at each other until dawn. How could you _stand _for this, knowing you've sold yourself to the city to pay your debts and my debts and your brother's and your _mother's_? That Meeran _owns _you, and you've got to sit here just the same, knowing the whole time that Leandra doesn't appreciate you for it, that Carver _hates _you for what you've done to his family. How could that be real?"

Gamlen stands, letters falling from his lap like autumn leaves, and crosses to Hawke where she lies. "Except that you know it is, in your heart. That every word I've said is true."

"It is true," Hawke whispers. Her eyes close.

"Stay here," Gamlen croons. "Take a breath, just once. Let the city live without you for a little while; it's stronger than you anyway. Let Carver strike out on his own like he's been wanting. Let your mother sleep a little longer. Just stay here, with your mangy mutt, and rest. A few hours. No one will notice. _Sleep._"

"No!" Fenris bursts out at last. Fury blazes in his blood, snapping the strings that hold him mute and motionless. He manages one step forward, then another. "Hawke. _Think_. You know you no longer live here. You live in Hightown. Your mother's home. Your mother was proud of you—you write to your brother every week. You _know this._"

"I live," Hawke says softly. Her eyebrows pinch together; her fingers clench in her lap. "I live—"

"Here," says Gamlen, and now there are many voices in his voice, whispering. "Stop fighting everything in the world, girl."

Hawke opens her eyes. She looks up to Fenris, ignoring the thing that wears Gamlen's face between them. She says, "I live in Hightown."

"Yes," Fenris breathes. Relief clenches in a vise around his heart. "Yes."

"Near you."

"Yes."

"I live in Hightown," Hawke says, strong and certain, and she sits up.

Gamlen explodes. He grows taller, six feet, eight feet, and his shoulders broaden—his skin darkens and thickens, ridging across his chest in rough stripes of skin that is not quite skin—his face changes, rippling into something masked and wet and entirely inhuman. The dog vanishes into nothing as the walls stretch and bend and warp into something larger, blacker, more dangerous. Hawke lands on her elbows and scrambles backwards, eyes huge—and Fenris is _there_, anger scorching white-hot through the lyrium, relief a violent chase behind it, Hawke's hands in his hands as he drags her to her feet, into his arms. The demon roars and Hawke throws her arms around him, yanking him fiercely against her; they have no _time _for this but not even the creature behind him could tear him free—

But Hawke says, voice like a storm, "Let's kill it." That is enough.

A staff materializes in her hand. It is not quite her father's staff from the waking world; it is all she needs, and as Fenris turns to face the demon he feels its heat ripple across his shoulders. His sword is a heavy weight in his hand—_real,_ Varania whispers—and Hawke is at his back—

"You should have slept," the demon says, shades of Gamlen's voice still coloring the hundreds of whispering tones. "Sweet child, it was a _gift_."

Fire blooms in the air, a brilliant burst of orange and gold heat that has Fenris shading his eyes, the demon flinching back. "Not interested," Hawke snaps.

It is not an easy fight. The demon is strong and they are only two, and no matter how often he leaps forward the creature moves faster, sliding back and to the sides more swiftly than any creature of sloth has a right to. Flame streaks by him left and right, interspersed with ice, with lightning, with odd shadows of power that twist how the world holds them to the earth. The demon moves like a snake, slithering out of his reach again and again and again, no matter how quickly he comes to meet it, no matter what magic Hawke throws to catch it in place. He blinks and it is halfway up the wall; he turns and it looms behind Hawke, masked face inches from her hair before Fenris yanks her forward, out of its reach.

Back to back they stand in the center of the room, breathing hard; Fenris asks, "If I lure—?"

"_Yes,_" Hawke says, and the next time the demon slips free from the stone Fenris does not lift his blade. It bears down on him like the tide, a thousand voiceless whispers washing over him—

Then— "Now!" Hawke shouts, and Fenris jerks backwards, sword lifted above his head—

Ice cracks out of the stone, racing in jagged ribbons up the creature's twisted, too-muscular legs. It looks down, snarling, scrabbling at its own thighs—

One hand falls to the stone with a hollow thump. The other follows, great clawed fingers twitching once before going still. Fenris meets its eyes, once; then he swings forward with his full strength, and the eyes fall away, and the head falls with them.

Fenris stands above the collapsing body for a long moment, breathing hard, staring at the fleshy glistening mass left behind. Then—Hawke says, "Fenris," and he turns, breath catching in his throat.

He's barely halfway back to her before her smile falters and her eyes drop to her feet. She makes a soft, wounded noise and meets his eyes again, and by the time he reaches her she has vanished up to her knees. "Hawke," Fenris says, gripping her arms, her shoulders, "Hawke, no—"

"No, it's—I think it's all right—"

"But I don't—I must tell you—"

"Fenris," Hawke says, and takes both his hands in hers. "I'll see you at the end of this. Okay?"

The words fall from him like lead. "I do not want you to go, Hawke."

Her waist is gone. Her arms going, her shoulders thin enough he can see the stone walls through them. Her mouth twists into a smile. "Oh, Fenris," she says, soft enough he can barely hear it, "when do we ever get what we want?"

His eyes fall closed. The pressure around his hands tightens, and eases, and—is gone. The room is silent again, smaller now with no shade of illusion to fill it.

He is alone.

—

"You did well," Varania says when he emerges, sword once more at home on his back. He throws her a sour glare; her eyebrow lifts as she crosses her arms. "Forgive me. Shall I wait while you lick your wounds?"

His lip curls. "No."

"Then stand up. You are not a child. You are a warrior. If you mean to save this woman, show me the brother who _fought for me_."

Fenris stiffens. And straightens, somehow, and finds himself looking his sister in the eye. "I have told you I have no memory of that."

"I do." Her eyes flash. "They called you _bellator _when you left the field."

He blinks and—_blood in his eyes—in his hair—his arms screaming in exhaustion and his sword broken—a crowd beyond number—shouting—_

He shakes his head and the image vanishes. Unsettled, he says, "That no longer matters."

She throws her arm out when he tries to move forward; he tries again and she _roots _to the narrow stone steps, drawing herself up to her full height, fury in every line of her face. "Tell me what this has taught you."

"What?"

"You come from this triumph over a magister's binding with hanging head and sullen mien. You say that your victory in Minrathous, which ended my life and my mother's life as we knew it, does not matter. You were _bellator _once, with fire in your eyes and iron in your hand and _that _is the brother I came here to aid, _Leto_, not this—whimpering pup. If you wish to act like a petulant student yielding all his sense to his tender bruised heart I will treat you as one; I will keep you here, and refuse to allow you advancement, until you find a stricture from your fight and _tell me what you have learned._"

Fenris snarls. The sound echoes in the empty spiraling tower, racing up and down the stairs until he cannot tell its source; his gauntlet-tips scratch into the grey-worked stone at his side, itching for a heart instead. "I could kill you now."

"Violence with no thought. You are better than this."

"Every moment we stand here threatens Hawke's life further!" His breath comes hard through his nose. "Stand aside."

"Tell me what you have learned!"

"You do not command me!" he shouts, and the walls tremble.

Varania leans forward, her eyes burning. Her voice is soft as ash; it cuts through every pounding echo of his rage. "_You_ do not command _me_."

Fenris stares; Varania meets him without flinching. This sister of his, with steel behind all her words—he breaks his gaze first, looking out into the empty hole of the tower below. He says, stilting, "The illusions are harder to kill than the demons."

Varania's mouth thins. Her eyes—soften. "Good," she says at last, and steps aside. The stone stairs stretch out before them, gently curved, unending.

All the same, Fenris does not move. "It was only one of the five."

"The first, though. You should be encouraged by your success. Most would have failed there; if nothing else, remember it was a magister who bound it."

"A weak one. I remember their power to be more formidable."

At last, Varania looks away. "I do not think it is their strength which has changed."

That sounds—Fenris shakes his head again, unwilling. "Enough of this."

"Fine," Varania says, and inclines her head. "We should move on."

Fenris stares. His sister raises her eyebrows, questioning; silently, he follows her up the stairs.


	4. Chapter 4

The next door stands twice as far from the first. They still cannot see the spire's ceiling; the floor has fallen far enough away to endanger them both. This door is finer-made, thicker, with iron hinges; Varania stands longer at this one, frowning as the illusion vanishes before turning to Fenris again. "This one is stronger."

"That was to be expected."

"I think the change to you will be greater."

"I will remember myself?"

"Yes," she says.

He shrugs. "I need nothing more," he says, and walks through the door into the sun.

A field, he realizes, when at last his eyes adjust to the bright sunlight, to the burning blue sky that stretches from horizon to horizon. Long shafts of grain bending under a too-pleasant breeze, and in the distance—a farmhouse, small and well-tended, warm honey-stained wood gleaming in the afternoon sun. He shades his eyes with his hand—

A child's hand. Too smooth, unlined, un-_marked—_no lyrium. No lyrium _anywhere_, not on his hands or his bare unmuscled arms or his child's soft belly. Eight, perhaps. Nine the oldest, _maybe. _A simple homespun shirt; black trousers tucked into rough boots that he tugs off immediately. Farmer's clothes. His hair falls in his eyes—_black hair. _

"What are you doing here?"

Fenris whirls. A young girl stands on the path behind him, dark hair braided over one shoulder, trousers and leather boots too large on her feet, suspicion in her bright blue eyes. "Hawke?" he asks, and flinches at the pitch of his own voice. He doesn't even _remember _the years his voice broke.

"That's my papa's name. Who are you?" She takes a step forward, her small hands fisted. "Are you—are you from the templars?"

"_No_." He spreads his hands, palms up. Child's hands. What sword can he wield like this? "I am…we are visiting Lothering. No templars."

Her hands unclench; her shoulders are still tense. "Who's we?"

"My…sister. And me. We're only passing through."

"You're on our land."

He has no explanation for this. "I—was only following the path."

She looks at it, then behind her, where the path winds into the woods that edge the fields. "The twins are asleep, but—there's a creek. Do you want to see it?"

It is a small creek, shallow-banked and choked with stones, weeds and cattails swaying cheerfully with the waters' flow. The shade of the trees dims it cooler, but not yet uncomfortable; Fenris searches the woods, but there is no living soul in sight but them. No demon. Not yet. The stream stretches left and right until it bends around a small steep bank; branches dip low on either side, a weeping willow puddled just at the bend. In the afternoon sunlight, the whole place glows like a child's story. He does not know this place, not like Gamlen's; he suspects, all the same, that it is true enough to life that there is no difference.

Hawke shucks her boots and wades into the middle of the stream. Fenris stands on the edge, watching; she looks at him when he does not follow, and he finds himself unsettled at the sight of Hawke's eyes in this child's face, so open and—unguarded. She asks, "Aren't you coming in?"

"Not at the moment. Has anyone else passed through here?"

She blinks. "No. Are you afraid of someone?"

"Yes. Are you?"

That defensive flinch again; she glances downstream, then drops her eyes. "N—No."

Should he be so direct? And yet, to waste time here… "You fear the templars."

Abruptly she kicks the water, sending a glittering spray of droplets into the air. "So what? Lots of people are afraid of them."

Fenris swallows, steels himself, feels his child's hands clench. "My sister is a mage."

Hawke grows very still. The creek still flows around her, eddying around her bare ankles; the faint breeze throws narrow dapples of light over her slender shoulders, her black hair come loose from its braid. A bird flutters by overhead, a dark slash of shadow across the water, her face—and then gone. Hawke touches her throat. She whispers, "Are you telling the truth?"

"Yes."

"She's an apostate?"

Close enough, in this country. "Yes."

"Are—are _you _an apostate?"

He laughs, startled at the question, startled again at the sound of his own too-high voice. "No."

"But…" She wades towards him now, water splashing at her feet, her eyes fixed on his. "You won't—you won't—" she drags in a breath, eyes wide, her voice very small. "You won't turn me in?"

Now Fenris moves to meet her, heart pounding, uncaring that his child's bare feet slosh too roughly in the creek. He would take her hand, but—this Hawke is so small. He is afraid he will crack her through. "No," he says instead. "No, Hawke. Never."

"Papa's name," she whispers, but for a moment a smile wavers across her face, as unsteady as the creek and as caught in light. "Does that mean we're going to be friends?"

His chest aches. He still remembers the first time she'd said the word to him— "I—yes. One day."

"I don't," she starts, both hands going to her mouth, and he is alarmed to realize she is near tears. "I want a friend. More than anything else. Someone who isn't the twins, or Mother, someone who knows what I am and isn't afraid of me." She swipes angrily at her eyes; she says, almost a challenge, "Are you afraid of me?"

"No," he tells her.

She smiles, sudden and brilliant—and the stream ripples, growing larger, swelling in its banks and overflowing with light, rising to his knees, his waist, his throat; Hawke is gone, the woods vanishing into gold mist; a voice whispers—_this girl belongs to _me—

"No," he snarls, drowning, blind, his voice the child's voice and his own at once, "she belongs to _no one—"_

_Not all hunger is for food, precious mortal. I know what she wants. I know her heart. _

"You know _nothing!_" Fenris shouts, and a squirrel leaps, startled, from the tree above him.

He blinks. The woods. The same woods, and the same creek—a different season, the leaves greener than the last, the rushes thicker. He turns and finds himself taller; he looks down to the hands of a young man and not a child. Seventeen, perhaps eighteen—no lyrium, still, and his hair still black, but the strength of muscles under his skin, in his back. Broader shoulders. No aches in his knees, yet. No calluses on his still-bare feet. No creak in the small of his back as he bends to touch the water's rippling surface. He wishes, suddenly, that he could remember this age in the waking world.

"Over here," says a woman's voice, and Fenris glances upstream as it continues, "there's a little bend, just by—oh! Hello!"

"Hawke," Fenris says, unspeakably relieved. She rounds the bend in the stream, laughing. She has aged too, a young woman now almost grown into her nose, as tall as she will be but still gangly; she has knotted her hair at the nape of her neck. The willow tree sways at her passing, a gesture like a greeting—and then behind her, his hand in her own, emerges a tall man with blond hair.

All at once Fenris feels his face settle into its old mask, familiar and easy despite that he has not worn it for ten years. The man is young, nineteen at the most, tall as Sebastian and broad-shouldered from heavy labor, his light hair cut short and tousled with sweat. The sleeves of his black shirt are rolled to his elbows; his cheeks have gone red with embarrassment. "Hello," he says. "Er—sorry. Is this your creek?"

"No," Fenris says shortly. Hawke laughs again, tugging the man forward, lifting a low branch out of his way as he ducks awkwardly beneath it.

Not quick enough; a twig scrapes across his forehead. "Ouch! Don't pull so hard, Ep."

"Then hurry up and get where I'm going!" She rolls her eyes at Fenris. "I swear, I can't do a thing with him."

He can think of nothing to say. Not that it matters; even if Hawke touches the abused place on the man's forehead with a mocking pout, the tenderness in her eyes as she pulls him down to kiss it is entirely unfeigned. It is not his place to speak. It is not—this is not—

It is a dream. It is a _dream_.

"Anyway," Hawke says brightly, turning back to Fenris, "was there something you needed?"

"Yes." The word throttles him; he swallows twice before trying again. "Yes. It's time to go."

"Go where?"

"Home."

"She is home," says the tall man, and pulls Hawke protectively against him. Fenris grimaces, unable to kill this unexpected jealousy as she glances up and grins; the man stares at him, unblinking, and then for less than half a heartbeat his eyes—flicker, and—

Fenris _knows_.

"Hawke," he says, his voice quick and too loud. "You told me you wished more than anything to have a friend know your secret and not be afraid. Do you remember?"

Her cheeks flush; she glances up quickly at the man holding her. "Yes, I did—can we not—"

"You trusted me with the truth. Have I once betrayed that trust?"

"No, but I—"

"Don't worry," says the man, cupping her cheek tenderly. "I know, dear one. Don't you remember telling me? And I said…"

"You said you loved me," Hawke whispers—but her eyes do not quite meet the man's eyes, and his mouth moves with her mouth, shaping the words with her voice. "You said you'd never leave."

"_Hawke_," Fenris snaps, and his feet splash loud enough into the placid creek that she startles, blinking as he strides towards them. "You told me once that only one other in Lothering knew your family's secret. What did you tell me that he said?"

The man tries to turn her face back towards him; Hawke still stares out of the corner of her eye at Fenris. "He…the blacksmith's son. There was…there was an accident."

"You healed me," the man says, and he kisses her.

For a moment Hawke yields totally, her eyes closing, her fingers clenching into his black shirt hard enough to stop Fenris's heart in his throat; then all at once she recoils, shoving back that broad chest, shoving _herself _back until she stands alone in the middle of the stream, breathing hard. Above them the sky has darkened: a summer storm.

"I healed you," she breathes. "And you were terrified. Out of your wits. You said it was over—you said you had loved me, _once_, and that it was over, and then you went to Ostagar and died." She stumbles back another step, and another, until Fenris can catch hold of her elbow and steady her on the uneven rockbed of the creek. "You died. You _died. _You are _not _him."

"Near enough," the demon says, and opens its mouth wide, wider, impossibly yawning—the face of the blacksmith's son splits at the corners of his lips and falls away, and the darkening forest around them leaves only the demon's shape in its shadows. It stands not much taller than Fenris, though it hunches heavy and bent; it peers at them from a hooded face, one eye gleaming stark white in rough contrast to the shade that thickens with every moment. "Near enough," the demon repeats, and lurches forward.

Fenris meets him. He does not know if he has shaped the sword or Hawke has—it is certainly no blade he has ever wielded—but it is straight and strong and halts the demon's swing without breaking. Hawke shouts behind him; Fenris spins to the left in a spray of water just as magic bursts from the thing's few-fingered hands, scorching the creek's bank black as charcoal. His heel crunches into a pile of twigs and rocks; he digs to brace and darts forward again, ducking under a spray of golden flame that mists the creek-water to steam, blade-tip driving straight between the ribs distending the creature's chest.

It looks down, gusts a foul-smelling sigh; Fenris grips the hilt and drags it outward, shredding shade-flesh into nothing. It gives a shudder great enough Fenris can feel it through the sword and its white eye rolls to meet his; fingers wrap around his throat too quick to check, and the voice of the forest says, "_This_ _is not a victory, mortal._"

Its head explodes in spears of glittering ice. The hand falls away; the body curls into itself and crumbles. The water hisses around it, and closes over it, and stills again until there is nothing left.

"Near enough," Hawke spits.

Fenris turns. Hawke's hands are still outstretched; as he steps towards her through the cold creek-water they falter, then fall awkwardly to her sides. She still wears the face that is not quite the Hawke he knows, but it is like enough that her smile—comforts him. She brushes a bit of ichor from his cheek as he reaches her, then drifts up to finger a bit of his hair. Something in his chest abruptly loosens, sharp enough that his heart stumbles.

"I like it," she says, and sighs. "Black suits you."

"You look—much the same."

"Fenris—his name was—"

"You do not have to tell me," he says, suddenly sure. "You cared for him."

"Yes. He…he died."

"It is good he was happy, then. If only for a time."

She laughs, embarrassed, and runs her fingers through her hair before checking herself. "And what about you? _Look_ at you, strapping young man. Not that it was a long fight, but you're not even sweating."

He shifts his shoulders. No aches, no scream of overtaxed muscle, a youth and vigor he cannot even remember. For some things he would not mind, but— "The cost is too high."

"I know," she says ruefully, and steps closer. Her thumb brushes over his chin, his throat. "No lyrium, either."

Fenris catches her hand. Her fingers slip against his mouth; he holds them in place, hardly knowing what he wants. "The cost," he repeats, feeling his voice drop, watching Hawke's eyes darken, "is too high."

She sucks in a breath; he moves closer as her free hand fumbles to his waist, as her fingertips slip from his mouth to his jaw, as his lips part. Water splashes between them as their legs tangle and the willow tree sighs through a sudden breeze, sending ripples across their ankles, and Hawke is close enough now he can feel her heat, her chest pulled against his, her hair on his cheek as she tips her head—

"Damn it," Hawke whispers, going still. Her breath brushes over his mouth; her hair slides through his fingers as she pulls away.

She is vanished to the waist already. Fenris grips her hand convulsively, then forces himself to ease his grip. Only the second door. Only the second. "I will find you soon, Hawke. I swear it."

She gives him a wry look. "I hope I remember this."

"I will remember for you," he murmurs, and ignores the irony.

—

When Fenris steps through the door, Varania goes white. Her mouth shapes a word—she staggers backwards—and Fenris's hands close around her wrists, dragging her away from the lip of the stone stairs even as the Fade ripples over his skin, stripping him of his false youth and returning him to himself again. "Are you well?"

"_Valeo_," she gasps, color already returning to her cheeks, but her eyes drop in shame. She trembles in his hold. "Forgive me. I did not—I am well. Forgive me."

His own concern annoys him. "We should rest. Sit down."

"No. No. 'Every moment we stand here.' You remember."

"It will do Hawke little good if you plummet to your death. _Sit_."

"I am well, I swear. It's only—" Her eyes flick up to his; her fingers twist together at her waist. He does not know what she looks for, but whatever she sees, it is enough for her to lift her chin in defiance. "I did not expect to ever see that face again."

That face—_ah_, Fenris thinks, abruptly distant within himself. He ought to have realized. Her brother's face—or, at least the face she remembers. There is something pathetic in that, that the face she knows so well is so alien to him. He does not know what to say—and eventually, trembling stilled, Varania pulls her hands from his grasp. He meets her eyes; he does not reach for her again.

The words fall from him without thought. "Am I so different from him?"

Varania's head jerks to the side, as if he has raised his hand to strike her. Already he regrets the asking; his mouth is open to swallow back his words when Varania says, "Yes."

Inexplicably, his throat closes. "I see."

"And no," she adds, and looks at him again with naked frustration in her eyes. "I see so much of him in you. You have his face. His nose, which was my mother's nose. You have his hands, and so many of his habits—you hold your sword as he did." She steps closer, searching his face for something he does not know how to give. Her brows pinch together, a bird arrow-pierced, pain without understanding. "You have everything of his anger and his hate. _That _I knew the moment I saw you. But my brother—my brother knew to hide that before his master. My brother would not have lifted his hand against the one who owned him even if he stood at the edge of death. But Danarius is dead, and I live, and _you _of all people have brought me to the Fade to save a woman who wields magic every part the same as he once did."

"Hawke is nothing like Danarius."

"That!" Varania cries, and throws her hands in the air. "When did you care for the command of one magister above another?"

Fenris spreads his palms between them, helpless, barely able to understand the change himself. He says, "I suppose—when it was my choice."

Varania closes her eyes, turns her back to him to begin her way up the stairs again. "How easily you say it, brother. If nothing else, I would know you for your stubborn refusal to explain yourself to me."

Easily! As if he has not spent three years and more wondering the same thing, cursing himself, unable to fathom how after the exhausted terror of his flight he had still ended in a magister's bed, willing and pliant and wholly desperate to yield every part of himself into her hands. Unable to separate his heart from his mind, unable to coax whatever he felt for Hawke out of the thorned grasp of a lifetime's slavery, as if there was any thread of him left not poisoned by the marks of Tevinter whips on his back, on his soul. A slave did not look for freedom—an _escaped _slave did not throw himself at the feet of the first master he saw—and he has done both, regretted neither. He _should_ regret it, should want nothing more to be tied to no living soul—and yet here he is, his mind and heart and wants and fears entwined as wires hammered by a white-gold forge, made stronger for the fire, unable to be torn apart. Even now he stands on the precipice, uncertain, so afraid of the mists at his feet he cannot take the final step—

But. But he stands in the Fade, with his sister, to save a woman with as much magic as any magister he has known.

He's made his choice.


	5. Chapter 5

**AN: **My apologies for the delay. In addition, please be advised that this chapter does contain some torture.

* * *

Varania stands at the third door for a long time, thick-planked black oak with steel hinges and handle. Fenris looks uneasily over the edge of the stairs as she works; he has never feared heights, but with nothing but this narrow lipless stone between them and the floor gone behind thick gold mists, he finds himself unsettled. The whispering has worsened, though he still cannot make out the words. He wonders what figures mark this part of the tower outside. If they've changed.

"Your friend—" Varania stops herself with a grimace. A moment later, she says, curiously inflectionless, "She trusts too easily."

Fenris lifts an eyebrow. "I know. Why?"

"She has begun to lower her guard against me. I cannot pass through the doors yet, but—I can see, a little."

"What is it? Is she—in pain?"

"This illusion is very strong." Her mouth thins; her voice hardens. "She is chained. There are three bodies on the ground out of her reach: the dark woman who fought with you, the dwarf, and a man in white armor."

"Sebastian," Fenris says, aghast.

"And—" Varania sucks in a breath, then spits out a Tevinter curse violent enough that Fenris twitches. "You are on the table. Bleeding. The rest is too dark to see outside that—Danarius stands beside you."

An instant of unsteadiness—then resolve simmering over, his knuckles white around the handle as he throws open the door.

It is good, he thinks distantly, that Varania has prepared him. Otherwise to see—_this_, to see torchlight glitter down the burnished bronze of Isabela's necklace, broken as sharply as her neck—Sebastian's white armor smeared with his own blood, blue eyes sightless and dim—Varric on his back, unmoving, one crossbow bolt between his eyes, another through his throat—he would not have been able to bear it. Hawke kneels just past them, sobbing, a thick iron-black collar closed tight around her neck. Short, heavy links chain her to the floor by her throat no matter how she strains and writhes and reaches forward. Her eyes are swollen; her fingernails have all broken to the quick, tips stained with blood.

Suddenly—the hot sick smell of burning flesh and a _scream_—

Fenris jerks, hand at his own throat. He knows that sound too well—and there in another dim puddle of torchlight he finds the simple stone table, manacles at the ankles and the wrists and the neck, to hold the pathetic thing atop it flat and unmoving beneath the white-hot blade Danarius pulls down its thigh. Not a mindless carving. Too delicate for that. Too deep.

The scream cuts off as the little knife drags free. It glints dark and wet in the torchlight—_a cruel thing, a handspan from hilt to blade with a sharp-hooked tip, runes gleaming in the harsh mage-lights his master has called to his service—his master's long white fingers so delicate on the handle, holding the blade to open flame, stroking lightly across the skin yet unmarked, the faint pressure horrifying as the knife drops from his sight again—_

"Stop it," Hawke gasps, and Fenris jolts from memory. "Stop it, Maker, stop it, _stop_—"

Danarius wipes the knife on a white cloth, lays the flat of it across the small iron brazier at his side. Coals glow ember-gold in its heart; in moments the blade has begun to stain red again with heat. "Dear girl," Danarius says, and Fenris shudders again to hear that too-familiar voice, that unctuous condescension from a face so newly dead it has not yet begun to fade from memory. Even the robes are the same heavily-embroidered grey silk, and he wonders ludicrously that Hawke has observed them close enough to make them here. "You've held on so long, haven't you?"

"Shut up," Hawke snarls, thick with tears. "Shut up. Don't touch him."

"Look at this. Your friends all dead at your feet. Your lover—" the knife-blade disappears to the hilt in the meat of the man's thigh, tearing out another tormented scream, "dying before your eyes. How long will you kneel there and let him suffer?"

Hawke bursts into a shriek of wordless rage. Her bare feet dig fruitlessly on the stone for purchase; her fingers claw at her own throat, striping red welts down her jaw, across her collarbone, worthless against the heavy iron. "I'll kill you," she gasps, sobbing for breath that comes too-thin and wheezing, "I'll kill you, I swear by Andraste's flames, I'll tear out your heart and make you _eat it_—"

Danarius laughs. Fury rises in Fenris, burning away the terror at last; he shakes himself and strides forward, hands clenched, into the light. He does not look at the bloody broken thing on the stone table, keening piteously under its master's hand. That shadow is dead already.

"Hawke," he says, and his sister's voice comes from his mouth.

He startles back—he had not even _noticed—_but Hawke's eyes are on him, now, maddened beyond reason. Sparks flash at the ends of her hair. "Help him! Maker, _move_—do something, do something—anything—"

"Danarius is _dead_," Fenris tries, his hands that are his sister's hands outstretched. Mage's hands shaped like his mother's hands, small and white and callused at the first knuckle, where a sewing needle might rest— "Hawke, you _know this_."

"You've betrayed him once already—you've _got _to make it right!"

"I've come for _you_—"

"He's your _brother!" _Hawke shrieks, fingers white where she grips her collar. He thinks suddenly of Carver—

"And you've waited too long," Danarius says, and Fenris whirls in time to see him slip the blade gently beneath the bruised flesh of his own throat.

Hawke screams. It's a sound beyond grief, beyond rage; it tears out of her like barb-sharp thorns, shredding her voice with its passing. Flame licks down her arms, her throat—an instant's breath—and it catches like a torch thrust into oil, an explosion of fire and light that blasts him backwards, blind, deafened, arms thrown up in useless brace against the pyre Hawke has made of herself. Naked heat cracks along his bare skin, scalding his sister's palms red and stinging.

_—he clambers to his feet, scowling, his hands clutched to his chest where they've skidded on the gravel. "Don't shove me!"_

_"Don't scare me!" Varania shouts, tears streaking down her cheeks. "If you ever do that again I'll tell Mother and she'll tell the master and then you'll regret it—"_

"Yes," says a low voice through the fire's roar, hissing and spitting like oil from a pan, as much smoke as words. "Do you feel this strength? It is yours. Take it."

"Mine," Hawke says, unhinged, and Fenris opens his eyes.

Distantly he realizes that Varania's face has frayed away, that his hands are his own hands, his fingers knotted around the hilt of his own sword where he kneels on fire-flickering stone. And yet it does not matter; Hawke stands on her feet, thick chain snapped at the second link, her head thrown back in the sea of fire that surges even now around her. The demon looms at her shoulder, tall and too broad and as much flame as flesh; it drags one white-hot hand down her throat and the collar _snaps, _two scab-black halves falling to ring on the stone like broken bells.

"Look at them," the demon whispers, wood cracking with sparks. "Your friends at your feet, your lover past death, every one of them slain by your weakness. This rage is yours, child; show them their sacrifice is not worthless."

"Vengeance," Hawke agrees and, just her namesake pierces impassively the prey it has run to ground, she fixes her eyes on Fenris's face.

He—stops.

He can do nothing else. Every instinct ingrained older than his memory demands that he submit, that he kneel before this magister in absolute obeisance because it _is _a magister and not Hawke, not the Hawke he knows, not with her eyes so cool and remote and imperious. Fire whirls like water at her feet, eddying the rough fabric of her robes against her legs. The demon stands at her back, mouthless face amused and impossibly patient—_knowing _what it holds, the sheer power it has opened in her heart, the strength to unleash her rage on everyone who has wronged her—and worse, Fenris knows, Fenris _knows _in the deepest shadows of his mind that he would go crawling to this magister if she demanded it, if she lowered her hand to him in the dust at her feet. This is not _Hawke_; this is a creature stepped wild and half-formed from the gold ageless mists, a thing made for war.

She says, distant and disinterested, "Fenris."

His throat closes around his voice. The demon sighs a thin spiral of smoke; Fenris swallows, then rasps, "Hawke. _Do not do this._"

"I will slaughter them."

"_Who?_"

The demon's mouth moves with her mouth: "Everyone."

"Hawke!" Fenris shouts, terrified. His mind races; he remembers a moment deep beneath the earth, a demon there, too, and blacker mists, and a voice out of time— "Your father. What did your father say?"

"He died."

"Your magic—" he starts, almost too hoarse for sense. He is on his feet somehow; one hand stretches empty between them. "Your magic will serve—"

"My magic," Hawke repeats, her eyes going to the wall behind his shoulder. "My magic will serve that which is—best in me." The demon shifts, little spurts of flame rolling down its shoulders in agitation. Hawke blinks, stirs, blinks again; she looks at _him_, and he sees Hawke behind the rage at last.

She says, abruptly strong, "My magic will serve that which is best in me, not that which is most base."

"You will fail your friends," it whispers, so close to Hawke's ear her hair chars. "You will leave them dead and unmourned; you will leave their souls to _suffer—"_

"They would suffer worse if I yield," Hawke snaps, beginning to weep, and in one motion she tears herself away from the demon's grasp. It reaches for her with a snarl; Hawke stumbles and falls and the fire that had clouded at her feet vanishes in a sudden stark hiss. Even as she scrambles backward Fenris is there above her, sword-blade swinging up to check the demon's blow. Fade-flesh sizzles against steel and Fenris pushes harder, seeking the give he knows from the waking world—

Ice bursts from the stone at his feet in a thousand spears, a shimmering brier-tangle stretching higher than his head. He looks back once to see Hawke on her knees, her hands fisted above her head—and his sword drives unerringly into the creature's heart until it bursts.

He has to shield his eyes against the spray, ice-shards striking the stone in a field of glass stars. His sword drops, tip trembling, scraping the floor. Then—silence, and Fenris breathes again, shuddering, his face wet with tears.

When he can, he turns. The torches have dimmed with no rage to feed them; the bodies of his friends have vanished, and the stone table with his shadow has vanished with them. Hawke, her face white, kneels in the center of the room. His sword clangs too loudly against stone as he drops it; then he is on his knees before her, her face between his hands, skimming carefully down the welted places on her throat, his eyes searching hers. "Hawke," he breathes, voice thick with smoke, "Hawke, look at me. _Look_."

"I'm sorry," she whispers, her eyes at last drawing into focus on his face. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry—"

He embraces her. Hard, and terrified, and brief enough his heart hurts at the loss—but when it is over Hawke wraps her arms around his neck tight enough to choke, and though she does not speak again neither does she let him go.

They stay like this for a long time, until Hawke fades, and there is nothing left to hold.

—

Varania meets him at the door. Without preamble, Fenris says, "You saw."

"I saw. That was the most dangerous thus far, I think."

"The illusion was the most real."

"And I see why you chose her. She would stand before the Senate and burn them all to ash."

"No," he says, unaccountably angry. "She would tell a horrible joke, and laugh when no one else did."

Varania glances at him, eyebrows raised, and for the briefest instant there is something in her face of his own uncomprehending fury. Then—it is gone, and there is nothing but cool disdain in its place. "You know her so well, then."

"After seven years, I could not have avoided it if I wished."

"Seven years," Varania says flatly. Her lips press together tightly for a long moment; then she says, "How did it feel, to wear my face?"

He studies his palms, remembering the paler, slenderer fingers, the calluses on the first knuckle. Not a warrior's hands; not a thief's hands, either. A mage's hands—but on a slave, and a slave's daughter, forced to keep secret the greatest natural skill she possessed. "Unexpected."

"Not sickening? The shape of a traitor who would be a magister?"

Fenris looks up, then, astonished at the vitriol in his sister's voice. Another flicker of that fury—and again, vanished behind an opaque expectation. He says, surprised to find it true, "No."

"You mock me."

"No. You have—you have risked much, coming here, even if I asked it of you."

"Demanded."

"Demanded, then." He squares his shoulders. "I am grateful. I will not forget this."

Her mouth opens, then closes. She looks abruptly—_wounded—_and then she turns and he is left with nothing but the tight knot of her red hair, the pale slender nape of her neck.

All the same, she waits for him to join her before they continue up the stairs again.


	6. Chapter 6

**AN:** I know I owe so many of you replies for the last few chapters, and I'm sorry I haven't been able to get to them. As soon as my schedule eases, I will do my best to get back to you!

* * *

By the time they reach the fourth door, Fenris has already forgotten how far they have climbed. No way to gauge it, either, not with the gold mists clouding the stairs beneath them, the tip of the spire still too far-gone above their heads to see. Varania has begun to flag, her cheeks reddened and her breath coming too hard; she huffs when Fenris puts a hand beneath her elbow at the last few steps, again when he guides her to the wall where she sinks without a word.

When he is sure she is recovering, Fenris moves to the edge of the narrow stone stairs, peering over the edge as if he might pierce the mists if he looks long enough. He can just see the steel-and-oak door, six turns of the staircase below. If he were to fall—well. He walks the Fade with a mage. Perhaps he will not count death so certain.

"You put yourself in a dangerous position, brother. One hand between your shoulders…"

Fenris turns. Her head is still back against the simple uncarved wall, but she has reached to the side, her fingers flat against the whitewood door with silver hinges that has just emerged at her touch. "Not your hand," he says.

Varania's eyes slip closed; a smile of true amusement flickers across her mouth, the first he has seen from her in his memory. It does not look as displaced on her as he expects. "Not my hand," she agrees. "Not here, at least."

"How much restraint you show."

"Sisterly affection."

Fenris laughs. Varania laughs too, tiredly, without spite, without shadow. He—remembers the sound of it. He will turn that over later, when there is time; for now, he rolls his shoulders to loosen them and says, "What of this door?"

"There are only two left." Varania twists to her knees until her forehead presses to the whitewood. "It's dim. There are candles on a fine, low table. On the floor as well. A fireplace burning down, and furs, and—"

She tears away from the door with a strangled noise, her cheeks staining a brilliant red. Fenris is already reaching for her; she waves him away without meeting his eyes. "Are you well?" he asks, bewildered.

"There are—" she coughs, puts the back of her hand against one cheek, "some things no sister should see of her brother."

"Ah," Fenris says, and turns abruptly to the stairs.

Perhaps not so long a drop as it appears. A few breathless instants, no more—enough for him to die of mortification, at least.

"Not only a friend, then."

"No," Fenris says shortly. He cannot control the hot flush that crawls from his throat to his jaw and the tips of his ears; neither can he look his sister in the face. "It was—a long time ago."

She gestures at the door. "It seems rather immediate, Leto."

He will not survive this. He grips the silver handle, throttled by embarrassment, and barely manages, "Perhaps you should not—"

"I should think _not_," she snaps with enough asperity that he nearly smiles in spite of himself. Sisterly enough to surprise him, even now. "Finish and come out again. That is—when you're done—" she breaks herself off, glaring, and Fenris smiles again. "Don't waste time."

"I will not," he says, and closes the door behind him.

—

The smell of incense overwhelms him in the first moments, strong enough even at the door that he sneezes twice. Sandalwood, he thinks, and something sharper behind it—and then he finds the piled furs and cushions before the fire, and does not think of the incense again.

He had forgotten. Or _made_ himself forget, though it makes precious little difference now. A dream—only a dream—

Hawke, kneeling beside another figure reclined in the furs, wearing nothing but her smalls. The fire is dim enough he cannot make out the details, but his mind impatiently provides them: the freckles dusting the inside of her wrist, the long white scar down her ribs and her right thigh, the flex of her stomach as she laughs, smooth and low, and bends until her hair slips over her shoulders in a shining black curtain. Dark fingers reach through it, tangling there, moving to grip the slender nape of her neck; Fenris knows that hand, knows too the lyrium that stripes it to the very base of the fingernails. The other goes to her hip and then lower, dragging her knee sideways until she straddles him, her pale thighs sharp contrast to his own bare, dark waist; the gesture draws a slow smile from Hawke, and when the man in the furs pulls her down to his mouth she goes willingly.

So willingly. Had she kissed him like this then? With such abandon, such total lack of reservation, quick soft noises in the back of her throat, holding his face with both hands to keep his mouth at her own? He remembers _he_ had been eager enough, ready to be done with his fruitless pining without the slightest apprehension of what would follow—and then Hawke gasps and arches her back in a long thin line of fire-glow, and the thing that wears his face laughs into her neck and pulls her flat atop him until her black hair mixes with his white.

"_Look_," says a soft voice, a woman's voice, and the fingers that suddenly press against the small of his back hold him in place, too, still as stone. The smell of sandalwood grows stronger. "Are you gratified? She has chosen _you_."

Fenris snarls, unable to strike, unable to look away. "This is a base perversion. This is _not _how it—how I—"

Hawke's brow furrows. Her head lifts away from the false Fenris's chest, her breastband a dark stripe across her bare back in the firelight; she murmurs, "Did you hear…"

The creature sits up in a whisper of furs, twining one arm around her waist, burying his nose in her hair until his lips brush against her ear. His muscled back is marked with lyrium in a pattern close to his own but not true, Hawke's memory imperfect after three years' passing; it shifts and glitters as he moves, as he whispers against her ear until she shivers. Hawke turns to look at him, her eyes lidding; he kisses her, slow, openmouthed, bold and sure in a way Fenris can hardly fathom. But Hawke—_sighs_, and shivers again, and yields so easily when he presses her back to the furs that it strips Fenris of his breath.

Gratified. _Angry_, in a cold, hard way that is not the anger he knows best; repulsed by the thing at his back; sick with horror. Too starkly aware that if this were his own temptation as Danarius had intended, it would look—little different.

"Beautiful," the demon sighs. Her chin rests briefly on his shoulder; when the false Fenris's teeth flash and Hawke gives a high, fluting gasp, she sighs in pleasure. "So few mortals know their own hearts so well."

"This is not her heart!"

Hawke twists in place, her hand tangling into white hair. "Wait. Fenris…someone's speaking."

"I have waited long enough," the thing she holds tells her, voice hot with promise. "_You _have waited long enough."

Hawke laughs and takes his earlobe briefly between her lips. "Don't I know it."

In a flicker of firelight he has pinned her by her shoulders to the furs. Fenris cannot see her face—only his own, eyes gone dark and intent, mouth parted, the lyrium twisting over his bare collarbones edged in light. Hawke reaches up, touches the white marks on his chin; he leans into her touch and she trails her fingertips up, across his mouth, the straight line of his nose, one black eyebrow. After a moment she cups his cheek, and his eyes flutter closed.

"I have missed you," Hawke whispers, her thumb stroking across his cheekbone, "so much, Fenris."

The knot in his chest tightens and bursts; Fenris howls, "_Hawke_! It is a _lie!_"

She jerks up, dark hair spilling over her shoulders. The false Fenris tries to take her into his arms again—but she pulls herself away, rising to her feet, her gaze moving blindly across the dimmed room. "I know I heard that. I _know _it."

"Hawke," Fenris says too quickly, aching to _move, _words tripping over themselves in his rush. The demon's fingers tighten on his back, nails digging into his spine. "Hawke, this is a dream. This is a dream. I am not—that thing is _not—_me—"

Her fire-flushed cheeks go pale. "What?"

"Hush," says his double, rising to his knees, unashamed of his own nakedness. "Come back to me. Lie down."

She yanks her hand from his. "Stop it. Just—wait a minute."

Those black eyebrows pinch together, apprehension rising clear in his face. "Why? Hawke, I cannot bear another moment without you."

"_What_?" She takes another step, hand clutched over her mouth. "What are you talking about?"

"It is a trick," Fenris snaps. Hawke's head jerks towards him—but the thing at her feet reaches for her first, grasping frantically at her waist. The demon behind him has begun to hiss, a low violent hush of air that stirs his hair.

"No," it says, openly pleading, "stay. I beg you. Stay_._"

Hawke looks ill. "You're not Fenris. You're not—_begging—_you're not him."

"Am I not enough?" Its voice trembles; it arches forward, still on its knees, false lyrium lighting white every place it touches her. She recoils; it follows, snaring her wrists, pressing her palms to its own throat. The lyrium surges in response and it _whines_, a sick high keening that pierces the crackle of the fire—but when Hawke tries to yank away it only pulls her closer, holding her in place, holding itself against her. "Am I not enough for you? I offer you—everything—"

"Andraste," Hawke gasps, shuddering, "let me go—let me _go—"_

The demon's hiss slides into something softer, something smoother, filling the room with its voice. "Isn't this what you wanted, child?"

"_No_," Hawke whispers, eyes wide, fixed on the writhing figure at her feet. "Oh, Maker, not like this."

"You wish to have him. To possess him, as a slave is possessed, as a lover is possessed. Look! He _gives _himself to you."

"I give myself to _no one_," Fenris snarls, and the hand tears away from his spine at last.

The sudden return of strength is enough to stagger him. He stumbles—forces himself to twist, to reach behind—but the demon is already gone in violet smoke, the smell of sandalwood growing strong enough to choke him. The fire surges in the hearth, chasing the shadows to the deepest corners; Hawke scrambles backwards, nearly tripping over the furs as the false Fenris curls into himself with a groan, as Fenris himself struggles towards Hawke with still-stiff limbs fighting him at every step. She flattens herself against the stonework wall, white as chalk.

His double throws back its head and screams. Only important in that it cannot fight—and then Fenris reaches her_, _the last few steps too fast, one hand striking the wall beside Hawke's head. She flinches back and her head knocks against the stone—then she blinks, twice, hard, as if all at once a veil has fallen away from her sight.

Her whole face changes. Fenris tenses, hope warring too hard with concern—and Hawke smiles, her mouth trembling, her eyes wet. She says, "_Fenris_."

He can think of nothing to say. He is so—glad_—_

She takes one step forward, into him. It is not an embrace—her arms are caught between their chests, her fingers at her own throat—but her face presses hard into his neck, her shoulders curved, her back bent as if the world has abruptly grown too heavy. Fenris knows the demon still hides somewhere, that his double still kneels gasping on the furs, that the final door still waits high above them—and as his arms come around Hawke to pull her closer there is nothing else but this moment that matters.

She pushes her face harder into his shoulder, hot and damp with tears. Her shoulders hitch as she drags in a shallow breath. "I am—" she starts, muffled in his leathers, "I am so sorry."

"You have no cause to apologize."

"Easy for you to say." Her fingers twist between them, the pressure of her knuckles against his breastplate enough to dig the metal into his collarbone. Her voice drops to a whisper. "I ought to have known better. I know it. That's not…that's not the first time I've—faced that temptation."

His heart twists, his arms tightening around her. "I tell you, Hawke, you have no fault here. I swear it."

She mutters something lost to his shoulder. He finds her chin with one hand, lifting gently; she resists only a moment before yielding, allowing him to raise her blotched, tear-stained face to his own, though she refuses to meet his eyes. A small, trembling smile quirks one corner of her mouth. "I am so—_humiliated_."

"I have never known you to embarrass so easily," he tries, striving for lightness.

The smile trembles again. "Frankly, Fenris, I'd somehow imagined the next time you saw me in my smallclothes to be a little more—I don't know. Mutual."

He laughs because she means him to, because she _needs_ him to, and when she curls into him again he lets her, pressing his mouth blindly to her temple. Her cheeks are hot enough he can feel it on his jaw, her tears sliding down his neck—but before he can wipe them free their brief reprieve comes to an unexpected close. Power seethes behind him, a sudden tide-rise thick with sandalwood; a voice very like his voice begins to laugh, and when Fenris turns Hawke's fingers dig painfully into his arm.

"Beautiful," the creature says again, though this time there is a thin line of mockery beneath the words. It tips its head—Fenris's eyes, and mouth, and lengthened ears—drags its hand down its own chest like Fenris's chest, though the markings have vanished behind pale violet-tinted skin. His double has gone, whatever was left of it made into this new shape for the demon's use. "If selfish of you, sweet child."

Hawke lets out a queer sob of a laugh. "See—_that _would never have convinced me."

Fenris shifts, moving sideways until he covers Hawke completely, all amusement gone behind the intense need to kill this thing that wears his face. With a quick twist he pulls his sword free, holding it between them; the lyrium that runs along his spine begins to tingle as Hawke pulls magic to herself. Like this he would have her stay back from the fight—and at the same time, he knows that to convince her would be impossible. Instead he says only, "Be careful."

"I'm not letting that thing get away. If nothing else, I'll throw my smalls at her. You. It."

He shakes his head, heat rocketing up his spine from her magic, from anticipation. "If the battle comes to that, Hawke, I'll regret not having lived to see it."

She laughs, sharp and startled—she looses his arm—she kisses his jaw, quicker than a blink. "For luck," she murmurs, and his heart leaping in his throat, he charges.

For all it has its shape the demon has little of his strength. It hardly moves at all—and yet it is there and _gone _as his blade comes down, as he swivels on the spot, as he reaches for the pointed, smirking mirror of his own face and grasps air. It taunts him, sneaking an arm around his waist, planting a hand between his shoulder-blades and shoving, ducking beneath Hawke's lightning and ice to dart frozen lips across his own. He cannot catch it—it remakes itself in smoke and shadow, impervious to his blade, gone from his reach in the difference between one blink and the next. It is only the knowledge of Hawke at his back that keeps his rage in check—and then all at once the creature is gone, vanished into nothing.

Fenris tenses, gaze flitting from the fire to the furs to the room's empty shadows—

"Damn it," whispers Hawke behind him, and his heart sinks.

The demon stands behind her, one muscled arm tight around her neck, the other, flickering blue, flat over her heart. "Love conquers all," it murmurs, mouth at Hawke's ear, inhuman eyes on Fenris. "I could make you love me."

Fenris lowers his sword, every muscle in his arms tensed to the point of pain. Hawke holds his gaze, the tendons of her throat ridged hard, bare stomach rising and falling as she strains for each breath. "There's nothing of love in that."

"You wouldn't care, dear child. Not after enough time has passed."

"And this has gone on long enough," Hawke snarls, and crushes her burning hands against the demon's face.

It screams. Screams again, staggers back to the wall and away from Hawke—and even as its flesh begins to blister and crack Fenris drives the heavy steel of his gauntlet through the demon's heart. It stares at him a long moment through pain-glazed eyes, reaching for its own chest where Fenris's hand vanishes; then, slowly, like candlewax, his features begin to melt away from the tinted skin. The creature's true face lasts a little longer, a narrower, prouder thing with dark eyes and a full mouth—but eventually it fades as well, collapsing into itself, and in the end there is nothing left but a greasy white ash and the dying smell of sandalwood.

"Well," says Hawke into the silence, and Fenris turns. She stands just out of his reach, her arms crossed tightly over her chest. "This has just been a dozen kinds of terrible, hasn't it?"

In a moment he has dragged a thick blanket from the pile before the fire. Hawke does not meet his eyes as he pulls it around her with clumsy hands; her mouth quirks all the same, and her fingers tangle with his armored ones as he begins to withdraw. "It has," he tells her, meaning it, and she does not fight him as he helps her sit against the forgotten furs. "But it is nearly finished, Hawke."

"Are there more of me? More—I don't know. One of me, perhaps, but more—" she waves an aimless hand before hunching into the blanket again, her knees drawn to her chest, "dreams. Like this."

"Yes."

"Have I failed in all of them?"

"_None_," he snaps, harsher than he means it. "You have not fallen to any of them."

There is a long silence, and then Hawke leans into him, resting her head on his shoulder. Her eyes are closed. "You lie almost as well as Isabela."

It takes time for him to find the courage, but when Hawke shows no sign of movement he reaches up with his free hand, brushes back dark hair fallen loose across her face. She crooks a smile; he grows bolder, resting his fingers against her cheek. "Will you be well?"

"Aside from the lingering humiliation still potent enough to make me physically ill, I suppose I'll survive." Her eyes flutter open, then turn up to him. "For the record, Fenris, what that thing showed you—that's not—that isn't what I want. From you. Not—not like that."

"Hawke," Fenris sighs, turning so that she is properly in his arms, abruptly certain enough of his own heart to still all doubt. The words fall from him easy as clear stream-water tipped from a jar. Danarius—is dead. _I give myself to no one._ "I am yours."

She goes still as carved marble. Then she straightens and grips his collar, and she says, "Fenris, if you don't kiss me the _moment_ I wake up, I will kill you."

He laughs, his heart beating high in his throat and hard enough to leave him lightheaded. "Not now?"

"_No_. Not in the Fade. Nothing stays, here." She blinks, hard; she flicks a corner of the blanket away from her feet to show him. "Not even me."

"It is only for a time." He takes her face in his hands, heady with victory, with _promise_. "Soon, Hawke. Wait for me a little longer."

"As if I could do anything else!" Her eyes glitter with tears; she smiles once, broad and bright enough not even his lyrium can match it. "See you on the other side."

"Wait for me," he breathes, and the blanket falls to stone, empty.

—

"_Misere_," Varania says. "You're _besotted_."

His blood still runs too hot from both battle and Hawke, and he cannot keep hold of his own tongue. "I thought you did not intend to look."

"You took long enough. I thought you might have fallen."

"No," he says impatiently, starting up the narrow stairs, past eager to have done with this, to have Hawke—the living Hawke—within his reach. "We waste time."

"Time?" Varania snaps, a fierce anger flashing through the word. Fenris turns, surprised—and Varania glares at him from a handful of steps below, her hands fisted at her sides, color staining high on her cheeks. "You stand in that room, coddling your precious magister, your _mistress_—you stand there and you pet her and you croon into her ear, and you tell me now that _I _waste _time_?"

His hand cuts across the air. "You don't understand."

"_I _don't? Hypocrite! You run from truth as much as ever."

He snorts, disgusted. "Would _you_ prefer to be coddled, then?"

Varania's eyes go wide; then they narrow to slits, fury swelling at her back like a storm. "What did you give her? What did you give to her that she chose _you_, slave? How did you win the heart of a magister with nothing to your name—and even _that _not your own?" She stalks upwards, too quick, her skirts whirling at her ankles, her bare feet loud on the stone. "What worth did she see in you that she is willing to give herself like this to a _slave, _when I spent ten years in the streets begging for the faintest scraps of their attention?"

"I—"

"I _begged _for them, _asine! _I knelt in the streets for the slightest crumbs of their indolent mercy, for them to stir themselves to throw a coin at me, a rotten loaf, a slopped wineskin, in the hopes that with it I might keep our mother alive one more day, so that I might spend it in another gutter for her sake, another street, all of them exactly the same. If they did not strike me I rejoiced; if they only ignored me it was a relief. Later when she died and I sewed I spent those days flattering them instead, wheedling the cruelest of them all for the sake of their _money_, for their precious benefaction, because if I did not I _starved,_ giving and giving and giving of myself in the shred of hope that one day one of them would deign to look my way if only for a _moment—"_

Anger stands livid in his throat, spiny and choking. "And so you sold yourself from freedom to the heel of a magister, _my_ freedom as your chip to barter with, so that he would dribble bits of magic into your hands while your brother followed at his feet like a slavering dog—"

"What else was I to do? What else? What did I have that did not belong to them? Work that could not feed me—owned in everything but name and given none of its protection—starvation and death chasing at my heels every moment like a shadow I could not shake!"

"You had _me. _I wrote to you. I asked you to come."

"Ten _years!_" Varania shouts, and the sound ricochets from the stone above them, below them, an endless hurt. "Years. _Years _you were gone from the city and not a word, not a glimpse of the Leto I knew behind the thing called Fenris, and then you vanished for _ten years _and suddenly I receive a letter, from _Kirkwall—_I could not believe it was you. How could I? Leto would not have abandoned me. You were not him. I knew there would be nothing for me here—but _he _knew of the letter, somehow, and he came to me in my master's shop and made me promises that were more than I could have dreamed in a hundred years of servitude. His magic. His knowledge. His _name_, mine, if I would only reach out my hands and take it."

Fenris grips her shoulders, his face an inch from hers. "I would have given you everything."

"Empty words. A promise of nothing. His magic is real, Leto—_was _real, was in my hands…" She searches his face, her brow creased and pinched with pain; when she finds no answers she drops her gaze blindly between them, staring at her own empty hands, curling the fingers into her palms, crushing the fists against her own eyes. She whispers, in agony, "You have left me nothing. I am alone."

His breath sighs from him in a quiet rush. His hold on her shoulders slips, then somehow—eases—and without quite knowing how his sister's head comes to fit beneath his chin, and her shoulders fold into him, and her feet stumble forward to meet his. She shudders with every breath, shallow, flinching things that nonetheless carry no tears; her hair, already treacherously loose, slips further, long red strands sliding down her neck, the high stiff collar of her dress.

It is not a comfortable thing. To stand here, in the middle of the Fade, demons no more than a door away at any moment, his sister bent against him like a bird—and between them all the bright-sharp scars of new betrayal, of wrecked hopes gone, thrown like clay to break upon stone; and the older softer bruises of worn and forgotten promises, of a mother dead, of a brother near enough to it not to matter. It is not an _easy _thing.

Fenris does not let her go.

Eventually, when Varania's breathing comes calmer, when her hands steady and his own stiffness begins to lift, she raises her head and steps away. Her jaw is softer than it was; her eyes fix to his, wariness not enough to hide her confusion, her defensive uncertainty. She murmurs, "I don't understand."

The answer comes easy and clean as a wind from the sea, Hawke's faint laughter in his ears. "You are not alone."

Her shoulders catch. Her chin lifts—and though she turns her head Fenris sees the wet gleam to her eyes. With a few deft movements she has pinned her hair into its knot again, the movements short, her lips pressed hard enough together to go white. When she is finished she straightens as if to receive a blow and says, "Then what will you do with me now?"

"Decide that for yourself."

"You would permit such a thing?"

"I do not command you," Fenris reminds her, memory tugging a reluctant smile, and without waiting for her answer he turns and begins to make his way up the steps again.

There is silence behind him for a long time. Then—footsteps, halting at first, then surer, quick and light on stone as his sister follows after him. He stops to wait; she joins him without meeting his eyes, color high on her cheeks, and when he gestures they continue up the stairs together, quietly.


	7. Chapter 7

**AN:** (Strongly) recommended listening: The Earth Prelude by Ludovic Einaudi. Listen here: /watch?v=bqqRGqE2zQw

* * *

Roughly half a dozen turns from the silver door, the walls of the tower begin to taper away and all at once, the mist thins to reveal the spire's tip at last. Varania leans on his arm again, her breath coming hard, but she does not ask for rest and rejects it when he offers; and when the gold-gilt peak of the narrow ceiling comes into view she gives a sudden, satisfied smile and quickens her pace. It is only fifteen steps to the end of the stone stairway—ten—three—and then it flattens out into a broad circle that rings the whole circumference of the spire.

Fenris goes first, testing it for wholeness; when he turns Varania moves to join him, her fingers trailing slowly along the stone wall, her eyes half-lidded in concentration. Then she stops—and under her palms emerges a broad well-carved door, the last, the finest, made of polished kingwood with golden hinges, a golden handle. She rests her forehead against it a moment, letting out a long slow breath; then she turns to Fenris and lifts her eyebrows as if to say—_well?_

"What will happen," Fenris asks instead, stepping closer, "when this last illusion is broken?"

Varania laughs. "You are very confident in yourself."

"I am certain of some things."

"I am not sure. The bindings will be broken fivefold; the tower may crumble beneath our feet, or vanish, or we may simply wake all at once. Danarius told me little of what would happen after—only that it would be over."

"My freedom. My will to fight him."

Varania meets his eyes. "Yes."

Fenris looks at her, once, then puts his hand to the wrought-gold handle. "Then we will find out together."

"This will be the strongest of the five. You must be cautious."

"I will. What do you see?"

She closes her eyes, reaches to touch the polished kingwood just above his hand—but the moment her fingertips brush wood a brilliant light explodes from the handle, blinding, scalding his palm—Varania cries out in a startled gasp of pain—the light swallows his sister, the spire, the door beneath his hand and hers, vanishing the world to leave only his name, sudden and terrified and ringing in the silence:

_"Leto!_"

—

Fenris opens his eyes to the dark. No, he realizes, blinking—not total darkness, only night, a small spare bedroom with wooden walls and floors covered with hooked rugs, one glass-paned window open to night-sky and starlight alike. Two candles on the nightstand, small and white and burnt low; a wide bed with a patched quilt, the color of its simple pattern invisible in the dimness; and a man beneath the quilt, tall, dark-bearded, eyes closed, forehead and throat lined with the strain of every breath. A smaller figure sits beside him in a low wooden chair, head buried in her arms at the side of the bed. He knows those shoulders.

"What is this place?" Varania whispers, and Fenris turns to see her at his back, her eyes wide enough to catch moonlight, her hair washed dim and pale in the stars.

"Lothering," Fenris says, just as low, though Hawke does not stir. "How are you here?"

"I don't—know. The door burned me. I think it meant to trap me, some last trick of either the demon or the magister who bound it, to stop any who might try to the break the seal…" She looks down at her hands, unmarked, unbound, and up again. "I think the Champion drew me through to save me at the last moment."

Of course she did. Fenris shakes his head, sighing, peculiarly relieved—and the man on the bed begins to cough, a rough hoarse thing with no breath and less strength behind it. Fenris turns, his heart in his throat—but before he can step forward Varania grasps his elbow, holding him in place, keeping him from Hawke who stirs and lifts her head from her arms in the dying candlelight.

"No," Varania murmurs, her brow furrowed. "The demon waits for this. Somewhere—I cannot tell where it hides. It knows we are here; if you move too quickly it will strike. Perhaps at her. Wait."

"Not long," Fenris snaps, twisting back to Hawke, but when his sister releases him he—does not move.

Hawke eases her father's head into her arms, holding a cup of water to his lips as the coughing fit begins to wane. He swallows, sloppy and weak, and she wipes the wet trail gently with a cloth; she lowers him to the pillow again and he sighs, a soft thing nearly lost to the dark, his mouth crooking in a smile as his daughter brushes his greying, sweat-sticky hair from his forehead.

"Where," he asks, his voice a thin croak, "is your mother?"

"Sleeping," Hawke murmurs. She is young here, nineteen, twenty, maybe, and ancient with the lines of grief at the corners of her mouth, in the tightness beneath her eyes. "Bethany's with her. Carver's out with the dog somewhere in the woods checking the traps. I don't know where."

"He'll come back. He always does."

"Of course he will," Hawke says staunchly. "We've got all his things."

Her father laughs, a deep warm thing that still keeps shadows of all the strength it once held. He says, "That's my girl."

"'Course I am."

He laughs again, then coughs, shorter than the last but weaker, too, and then he turns his head on the pillow, his eyes opening at last, copper washed gold in the candlelight and piercing as an arrow. "Listen to me," he murmurs, "my girl. I've been meaning to tell you this for too long."

"Don't," Hawke says, turning her face away from the light; her father's hand fumbles from the blankets until it wraps around her own, and she grips it with both of hers as if it might stay him. "Papa, please."

"Do you want me to tell you to be strong?" He smirks; Hawke laughs, reluctantly, shaking her head. "I can, you know. I can say all those things people say on their deathbeds. Just like those old books we used to read together." His voice, thin as it is, grows lighter with good humor. "Don't you remember? 'You must be strong, my dearest heart, for I go to a better place,' and 'though your soul may break into a thousand pieces you must forget me,' and 'do not grieve—I will be the spring breeze tickling the grass, and the babble of the stony brook, and the rainbow in your heart—'"

"Oh, shut up," Hawke whispers, and brings her father's hand to her forehead. "You babble more than any brook I've ever heard."

"Can't help it. If I don't, everyone starts brooding in corners."

"Maybe we like brooding." A tear slides down the curve of her cheek; she wipes it roughly on her own shoulder. "Papa, those books were _terrible_."

"Why do you think I read them to you?" His smile dims, then fades. "This life means nothing if there is no laughter in it."

Hawke's face crumples. She kisses his fingers, his knuckles, and crushes them in her hands and against her mouth, tears choking her voice, spilling in bright shining streaks of starlight down her cheeks. "Please. Please, Papa. I can't—I can't do this. Not alone. I can't—"

His fingers slip away, twist, twine through his daughter's until he holds her just as fiercely. His own eyes are bright and wet; at Fenris's side, Varania sucks in a shallow, shuddering breath. "This is not the end. It's _not_, darling, don't you see? It's a _start_."

"Start!" Hawke laughs, still crying, still choked by sorrow. "Start of what? Of grief? Of a hole in the middle of all of us that will never be filled again? You know how terrible I look in black."

"Yes. You have your brother, and your sister, and your mother. It's easy for me to tell you to be strong for them—" he coughs, sucks in a wheezing breath, tries again— "but remember to be weak with them, too. Grief doubles its weight when it's borne alone."

Varania's hand fumbles into Fenris's, clenching hard. Hawke shakes her head, sliding from her chair to kneel beside the bed, bowing her head until her forehead rests on her father's chest. "So wise," she whispers. "Do all men grow wise in the last moments of their lives?"

"Only me," her father says, his smile trembling, his hand sliding free to stroke his daughter's hair, his fingers tangling in her braid, his eyes shining. "That's why you've got to remember this."

"Remember what? My heart breaking?"

"It'll mend." He cups her cheek. "Remember this. Love your brother, even when he's being an ass. He only wants to find his own path, and sometimes that means he's got to get away from you, if only for a while. Trust him to come back. And—protect your sister. But be careful about it—she'll find a way to make you pay if she realizes what you're doing, and if she ever realizes how much strength she's actually got behind her fear she'll change the world. Don't forget to let your mother boss you around a little."

"I will. I swear it."

"My girl. My daughter. Come here." She lifts her head until he can kiss her forehead, a benediction, a goodbye. "I'm sorry I'm leaving you with all this." She stays there, her eyes closed, her jaw tight, her tears dripping from her chin to pool in the hollow of her father's throat; his hand cups the back of her head, hard. "I love you so much. So much. I'm so proud of you, of everything you've done, of everything you'll do when I'm not there to see it anymore. There's not much advice I've got left to give you, but—laugh. Laugh, and fall in love, and out of love and back in again, and get married, and have a dozen fat little children that I can haunt from beyond the Veil and sing lullabies to when they're almost asleep."

"Papa," she says, weeping.

His eyes open; tears slip slowly down his temple, into his hair, vanishing there. "And tell your mother—tell Leandra, when she wakes…"

He trails off. His chest rises, and falls, and does not rise again. His eyes stare upward, unblinking, at the shadow-dim crossbeams of the ceiling.

Hawke does not move for a long time. Her fingers clench into her father's shirt, and relax, and clench again; his hand still rests on the back of her head, no grip now, only a memory of strength. Eventually she straightens, and stands, silent, still; she passes a hand over his eyes to close them, and pulls the quilt to his chest, and brushes the backs of her fingers across his cheek.

"I'll tell her," she whispers, and bends to kiss his forehead. "Goodbye, Papa."

Then she pulls away, and in the breath of her passing the last of the candles blows out.

Fenris can hardly move. Can hardly speak, his throat tight and choking, his chest heaving, his sister's hand clutching his own; he swallows hard, and again, unable to dislodge the rough sorrow from his voice. "You must let me go to her."

"No," Varania says, just as tight with grief. "This is only a memory. There is nothing you can change, here."

"How long?" he demands. "How long?"

She sets her jaw. "You must trust me."

_Trust her—_

—but the world is already changing, the little bedroom melting away to a stony hill, night yielding to a brighter sky, to morning daylight grey and thick with smoke, distant shouts and crackling fire eating the evening silence. Fenris jerks, startled—and Hawke races around the bend in the hill, Carver at her shoulder, Aveline in no armor striding forward with a templar—Wesley, supplies his memory, as doomed here as in the waking world. Hawke's mother and another young woman follow at the last, and Hawke swivels as they enter the clearing atop the hill. A little older, Hawke, though not by much; impatience in her face as she hurries her family forward, her staff in her hand, her eyes flicking again and again to Lothering where it burns at the foot of the mountain. She mutters something acerbic; Leandra snaps; the young woman embraces her, and smiles, and lifts an eyebrow until her mother smiles too.

_Bethany_, he realizes, and his heart sinks. Bethany, who _died—_

The ogre, when it comes, moves like a mountain made flesh. As slow as it is they cannot evade it—the clearing is too small, and more darkspawn choke every path away from flight, and as Fenris watches in helpless horror it reaches one enormous hand down and plucks Bethany from the earth.

The world goes silent. Hawke shrieks something without voice; Carver charges, his face white with fury, with dread; and then out of that quiet, three dull, muffled thumps: Bethany's head striking earth, and again, and again. Then she falls. She does not move after that.

It is so still—like a mummer's tableau in the squares of Minrathous. The ogre fades, its purpose fulfilled; the mountain fades save this clearing; Aveline fades and Wesley with her, his veins already purpling with the touch of the Taint. Hawke staggers forward to where Carver has bent over his sister's body, hands hovering uselessly at her shoulders; he snarls something as she comes, his face a twisted mask of grief, and Hawke recoils. She looks to her mother, made a statue by sudden anguish.

Leandra's lips part, her eyes fixed on Hawke in a sudden, fierce stare, and a voice that is not her voice whispers, "_This is your fault_."

Before Fenris can take a breath the world ripples, remaking itself, resolving like a pool of water. It settles into a ship's hold, crowded with blank-eyed refugees, thick with the scent of unwashed bodies, no light but what falls through the wood-slat grating to open air. Hawke huddles in a corner against a stack of crates lashed to the deck, Aveline asleep on her shoulder, Carver nowhere to be seen; Leandra sits against a slumped sack of meal, her eyes hooded and empty.

"I'm sorry," Hawke tries, barely a whisper.

Her mother does not look at her. Aveline shifts in her sleep, nestling further against Hawke's shoulder; she sighs, and Aveline whispers, "_Your pride has killed them all_."

Hawke jerks away, her eyes wide—but the world changes again, seeping in seconds to a dark, high-ceilinged cave, deep beneath the earth, only ruined masonry left of a once-grand avenue carved from the sheer rock. Here and there dying torches dot the walls; in the distance a light shines, but it is impossible to tell if it is daylight or only another cavern.

Fenris stiffens. Varania looks at him, questioning; he says, startled, "I know this place."

Her brow furrows, but before he can answer a low moan rises at their backs, a thing made entirely of sorrow. Varric, one gloved hand over his mouth; Anders, his head turned away, his eyebrows pinched; Hawke, on the ground, Carver's head in her lap.

"Her brother was lost here," Fenris says distantly. Varania makes a soft noise in the back of her throat; Hawke forces a smile and thumbs her brother's sickly-white cheek, the veins too blue beneath his skin. He smiles, pulls a dagger from his belt with trembling hands—

Hawke takes it.

"Wait," Fenris says. Hawke lifts the blade, finds with its tip her brother's heart; again Fenris says, "Wait."

Varania touches his shoulder. "What is it?"

"This is—this is wrong. Her brother did not _die_. Anders gave him to the Wardens—he survived the Joining, lives and fights with them even now. This is not right."

The knife slides home. Carver jerks and gasps; Hawke bends over him, weeping; her brother snatches at her arm with a clawed hand and says, "_You thought you could protect us._"

"_No!_" Fenris shouts.

After that, the world shifts too quickly. He could not move even if he wished to; he sees Isabela sling her arm over Hawke's shoulder in a Lowtown hovel, the Tome of Koslun on her hip, listens to her say with such bitter mockery as he has never heard in her before, "_You're only one woman. What did you think you could do_?"

"No," he breathes again. "She came back—"

—Anders stiffens and turns away, betrayal in his face, in every word. "_Your pride will cost our lives._" Merrill, her enormous eyes hot with anger, her slender hands in fists that tremble with rage: "_How dare you! What makes you think I want you here? Get away from me and don't ever come back!" _

Varric, mouth tight in disgust, turning his back on all of them—Aveline with her husband's shield in her hands and accusation in her eyes—

A bedroom, soft with firelight. Scarlet hangings, dark wood—and a shadow before the hearth, head bent towards the flames. _No_, Fenris thinks, voiceless in agony. Hawke rises from the bed, white sheet clutched to her heart. She whispers, "Please. Don't go."

The shadow turns and looks at her, unchecked revulsion and resentment alike threading its voice. "_This was a mistake. This never should have happened._"

She staggers, as if he has struck her; she sinks to the bed, silently, her lips parted, her face white. "Of course," she says, soft as a sigh, as wind through autumn leaves. "Of course not."

And one last change, the bedhangings falling away, the firelight dimming as the shadow grows and thickens into something harder and darker and choked with the smell of death. Hawke drops to her knees, her hands still wrapped in the sheet—and even as Fenris watches the sheet twists, and shreds, and remakes itself into the softer shroud of a wedding dress, stained at the wrists with old dried blood, and at the stomach, and at the throat.

"Please," Hawke says, hushed in the silence of the foundry's pit. "Please, please, please don't leave me alone. Don't leave me. Mother, _please._"

"My sweet girl," Leandra sighs, her lips flaked and dry, her eyes hollow, her hand no longer her hand. "You tried so hard."

Hawke bends over her, reaching without sense for her shoulders, her forearms, her face. "I know. I'm sorry. I tried, I tried, I tried—"

"And you still failed."

Hawke stiffens, pulls back. "What?"

"You failed," Leandra says again, kindly, and cups her daughter's cheek with dead fingers. "Everything you have touched has withered. You have saved nothing, protected nothing, preserved nothing. You have destroyed everything you loved. Sweet daughter, you have _failed_."

Hawke stares. She repeats, aghast, "I have failed."

Her mother crumbles in her hands. Her fingers flex, empty and trembling; then Hawke stands, eyes wild and wet, alone, trapped in a darkness Fenris cannot breach. She lets out a small, queer breath, and turns away, and between one step and the next the foundry diminishes into nothing.

"Don't leave me alone," she begs the silence, barely a breath, no sound but the tremble in her voice.

Varania grips his arm. She says, hard as steel, "_Now_."

He moves. He needs no urging—he is coiled tighter than a spring already, every nerve humming, his lyrium alight in agitation and grief and a fury that blazes beyond words. In the fifteen steps between them a room takes shape: Hawke's bed, or near enough; a fireplace, dead and empty; the cold narrow light of stars through her open window. She stares blindly into the darkness, her back to him; all the same Fenris does not hesitate when he reaches her, taking her in his arms, finding her hands with his own as if to scorch the ice from them with will alone.

She shudders. He tightens his hold—and the words come as simply as they once did so many years ago, when the despair was newer and his own heart still sore with fear. "I don't know what to say, but—I am here."

Her head turns; her fingers flinch within his grip. "Fenris?"

"I am here. I'm here, Hawke, and I will not leave you again. I swear it. I _swear _it."

"You left." Not an accusation: a simple truth.

"I did," he says, and closes his eyes, his cheek against her temple. "I have come back. It took me too long, but—Hawke, I am _here_."

"Everyone is gone."

"No. I am here, and—Varania is here, and our friends wait every moment to hear word of your waking."

"Not my mother."

"No," Fenris says, hating the word, hating more the defeat in her voice. "Nor your sister, nor your father. But Aveline, and Sebastian, and Varric and Isabela and Merrill and the abom—Anders. All of them. Even the dog."

"The dog!" Hawke says, startled, and for a moment there is life in her eyes—

"Everyone," Fenris repeats, circling her now until he holds her face-to-face, desperate to convey with his conviction what she will not believe with words alone. "Hawke, you are _not alone_."

"I've ruined them all. I tried to protect them—I tried so hard and they all _died—_or left, because of my pride—"

"Not because of you. Hawke, listen to me. You were never to blame for this. For any of this." He curses; he presses his mouth blindly to her forehead. "Hawke, if you have ever trusted me, believe me when I say that there is no future for me that is not spent gladly at your side."

She looks up. Her eyes search his in a torment of hope; he cups her jaw, his thumbs stroking across the high bones of her cheeks where the starlight pools, holding her gaze as long as she needs it despite his own trembling, despite her breath that comes too quick and shallow enough to shake her in his arms—

She grips his wrists. She breathes, "I believe you."

Fenris crushes her against him. Her own hands come fumbling and awkward around his shoulders; he savors that, savors more the touch of her cheek to his cheek, her mouth to his jaw. He has no idea how much time this illusion has taken from them—minutes, maybe, or hours, or lifetimes—and none of it matters, _none_ of it, because here at the end he is where he has always been meant to be.

Hawke's knees buckle. He has enough hold on her that she does not fall, and when she has her feet squarely beneath her again she raises her face to his and she—smiles.

Hawke_ smiles_. The one he loves best, that has nothing of shadow in it. He had forgotten.

He wants to kiss her. Desperately, fierce enough that his head bends without thought, but—_nothing stays, here_. His breath catches, then blows loose and hot with frustration; Hawke smiles again, tears brimming in her eyes, and when his trembling knuckle brushes against her cheek she leans into it, cups her own fingers around his, pressing his palm against her face and holding it there, against her, as if this might be enough to keep her here, as if she needs nothing more in this place of nightmares and twisted dreams and the worst memories of her life than _him_, than his touch, his fingers beneath hers.

And that—_fits_, Fenris thinks, watching her eyes fall shut as he pulls her closer, away from the window's star-pale light, feeling her heart race hard and steady in her chest where it presses to his even through his armor, through her shirt. After all this, after all the tower behind them and a world still away from life—he finds he needs nothing else, either.

"You're here," Hawke whispers into his neck.

"I am here," Fenris says, his mouth in her hair.

Hawke gives a watery laugh. "This is the worst Harrowing ever."

Fenris snorts, feeling her laugh again, a ripple of motion against him. Unbelievable, to feel such contentment in such a place as this, this room so near hers and so unlike it at once, where every dream might hide—

He tenses. A cool breath sighs across the back of his neck to make him shiver; his sister says, low and warning, "Leto."

To leave Hawke in this moment is to tear out half his heart; he does it all the same, reaching for the blade nearly forgotten at his shoulders. Hawke is in no condition to fight and truly, neither is he—more than anything else Fenris wishes to be _done _with this place, to put his hand in Hawke's and know that neither of them will vanish again.

Varania shouts like ice cracking. "_There_!"

And Fenris sees it. The last demon, the last temptation, rising from the shadows of the dead hearth like a Void-born beast, black mist drawing into its edges until it stands twice his height. Thick fleshy spines jut from its elbows, from its shoulders, muscles where no muscles are meant to go; four twisted horns spear backwards from its temples. It says, mist sighing from its mouth with every word, "_Then I will have all of you._"

"None of us," Fenris snarls, and the beast is on him.

This fight is not like the others. It is not quick, possesses no unnatural strength—and yet its sheer size keeps him from a killing blow, from taking the thing's head from its shoulders or its heart from its chest. Hawke tries to aid him when she can—but her magic is weak and spitting with exhaustion, and her flame bursts uselessly across its massive chest, her ice crackling glass-like beneath its feet. "Back!" Fenris shouts, and she falls away to the far side of the bed—better then to keep the thing's attention from her altogether if he can, until this is finished and he is victorious, or until—

"_I see you, slave_," the demon breathes, its hand swinging down across his sword in a spray of white sparks. "_A coward's heart, and a coward's strength_—"

Fenris laughs, the sound tight beneath the thing's weight, his arms straining, his back straining. "You think I do not know this?"

Too many eyes narrow, appraisal and disdain at once. "_You have fallen before. You will again._"

"Not to you," Fenris snaps. The demon leans closer, hot mist hissed through sharp teeth clouding the air between their faces, its mouth nearing his mouth. Its fingers curl around the edge of his blade, black claws whining across steel; Fenris bares his teeth, unable to pull away, unable to yield even an instant beneath the impossible pressure of its weight—

The demon jerks. Sudden, and hard, all its eyes going wide at once—

"Not to _you_," Varania hisses, and wraps both hands around her knife-blade driven through the creature's spine.

The Fade explodes. It is not the primal force he knows from Hawke's magic, no fire or lightning to scorch the world—instead it is something else, something wholly Tevinter, the quick entropic siphoning of all power from the demon Varania holds pierced before her. It _screams_, twisting up, reaching behind itself with arms suddenly too long—but Varania moves with it, her hair flying from its knot, her hands brilliant with power on the knife's leather-wrapped hilt. Fenris scrambles back, feeling the lyrium begin to seethe with sheer magic; it surges around them in wild, unfocused bursts, dragging on something innate to the Fade itself, innate to the creatures within it, to the demon before them—

Something _snaps_. A piece of twine, or a link in a thin gold chain—

The demon falls silent with the sudden hush of power. It falls, slow and inexorable as a tree falling; when it strikes the stone it collapses into itself, a husked thing, all its formidable strength dried away in the space of two breaths. The little knife drops to the ground with a quiet clink.

Varania stands behind it. Her shoulders heave, her eyes wide with shock and exertion; sweat stands sharp on her temples to stick her hair there in dark tendrils. She gulps air, once, and then again, and then she lifts her eyes to Fenris's with naked apprehension in every line of her face. She says, proud, unsteady, "This is what I am, Leto."

He says, just as sure, "You are my sister."

She sucks in a breath—and then she darts towards him with quick steps for one hard embrace before falling away, as if embarrassed by her own emotion. Hawke is no further behind, smile splitting her tears; she keeps him longer, though no less hard, and when she releases him it is only to turn to Varania with the same firm grip. "Thank you," she says, swallowing roughly, moving to hold her at arm's length. "Thank you. I can't thank you enough."

Varania glances at Fenris, helpless in the face of this open gratitude. Fenris shrugs, smiling despite himself, his heart racing as Hawke reaches for him again without releasing his sister, pulling them both against her; around them the Fade grows gold-bright and gleaming, washing away the stone walls of Hawke's room, the kingwood door, the spire-tip spiraling high above their heads.

The light swells, silently. He sees his sister's hair, and the bright shining of Hawke's eyes…

The gold fades to white. He sees nothing more.


	8. Chapter 8

**AN: **I'm behind on replies again, but I thought you'd rather have the last chapter. I'll get to them as soon as I can.

But-here we've come to another ending. It really means a lot to me that y'all have read and commented on this so far, and I genuinely hope you enjoy this last installment as well. As always, thanks for reading. :)

* * *

Fenris opens his eyes.

At first the world is too bright, the sunlight streaming through the open window enough to blind him; he blinks through the watering, and slowly finds the heavy beams of Varric's ceiling, the deep-stained wood walls, the fat brass lamp still cheerful atop the side-table. He blinks again, lifting a hand to his head as he struggles to chase back the groggy memory of dreams, and begins to rise.

"Oh," says a voice, startled and light. _Merrill_. "You're—you're awake!"

An irritated noise at his side: his sister, fingers pressed over her own eyes, her mouth pinched with exhaustion. "Be silent, please."

"I will, only—only—" Merrill bites her own lip, her fingers white around her staff. The room is empty save her, even the dog gone—how long have they been asleep? "Lethallan?"

Fenris twists, ignoring the protests of overtense muscles, of the faint throbbing ache behind his eyes. _Hawke—_

Hawke, who lies still between them with one eye cracked open, a faint, weary smile, her fingers wiggling a slow hello to the room at large. Merrill makes the noise like the cry of a swallow. "You're awake. You're awake! How are—are you feeling all right? Are you—all right?"

"I'm awake?" Hawke croaks. "I feel dead."

"Let me go fetch Anders. He's just outside—after you stopped screaming he made everyone leave until he decided they could stop hovering. But I don't think he'll be able to stop them now."

That Hawke does not immediately demur tells Fenris how poorly she feels. Eventually, she says, "That…might not be a bad idea. But—Merrill—"

Merrill's eyes soften. She smiles, small and bright. "Of course, lethallan. For as long as I can."

"Thank you," Hawke breathes, and Merrill slips away, the door closing softly behind her.

At last, there is silence. Varania rolls to her side on Varric's crumpled quilts, pushing up with a careful elbow; then, with a long, slow exhale, she rises to her feet. She wavers only once, reaching for the side-table to steady herself, glaring at Fenris's aborted stretch towards her. "I am no invalid," she says shortly, pursing her lips. "Look to your Champion."

"I resent that implication," Hawke mutters, just as hoarse as before, and sniffs at Varania's rolled eyes. Still, as Fenris's sister makes her cautious way to the chair beneath the window he cannot help but be grateful for her consideration, for even this little privacy she can give them before their friends burst through. He lowers his gaze, finds Hawke's eyes already on him, something both expectant and opaque enough in her look to nearly unnerve him, even now.

He lifts a hesitant hand to her cheek. Her eyelashes flutter; he grows bolder, brushing her hair from her eyes, smoothing the backs of his fingers over her forehead, the rise of her cheekbone. "Tell me the truth. Are you well?"

Her head shifts on Varric's embroidered pillow. "The truth?"

"Yes."

"I feel like I've been raked apart over hot coals and then put back together all wrong."

He snorts quietly, bending closer, feeling her breathing change with the shift of his weight on the bed. "I believe you."

"Why? Do you feel much better?"

"…No."

Hawke gives a soft, tired laugh, and when he feels a tug at his hip Fenris looks down to find her fingers twisted into the hem of his jerkin. She says, quietly, "I remember, Fenris."

His heart jumps. "What part of it?"

"Everything."

He tries to speak, finds no words. "Hawke—"

"How long," she asks, her voice low, her fingers tightening, "are you going to make me wait?"

Fenris laughs, the sound made looser by the hammering of his pulse in his throat. He slides one hand into her hair, the weight of her head reassuring and real in his palm; with his other he curls his fingers beneath her chin, touching the tip of his thumb to her lower lip. Hawke watches him throughout, steady and unflinching; at that her tongue comes out to wet her lips, and despite the heat that explodes through his chest Fenris manages to chuckle.

He leans down. Her eyes flutter but do not close, her hand skittering from his hem to his stomach, his chest, the bare curve of his throat. His lips brush just barely over her forehead and she sighs; he catches her cheek despite the quick turn of her head and she sighs again, more impatiently. "Don't _tease_," she whispers, looking up, her voice pained—

Fenris kisses her.

Hawke makes a quiet, startled noise that he feels to his very bones; then her eyes close and her hand slides to the back of his neck, pulling him nearer as she slants her mouth better against his. He drags in a breath through his nose, shifting his weight above her, his free hand moving to brace itself on the bed at her shoulder. She laughs against his lips, her eyes crinkling with good humor; he smiles himself, and kisses her again, and again, long slow things that draw on every part of him left after this waking dream, holding nothing back, not any longer, not after three years' worth of wasted time.

Somehow she frees her other hand from the throw tangled around her hips, reaches up to his nape, dragging her fingernails into his hair there to send a rush of heat down his spine. He knows the lyrium lights in sporadic flickers over his bare arms, his back, his ribs where the thorns twist beneath his leathers; he does not care and Hawke does not once look to them, her mouth seeking his mouth over and over again, hot and _wanting_, her fingertips dancing down his jaw, up the curves of his ears to make him shudder, into his hair again.

Three _years_. He will never be able to repay her.

But, lifting his head at last at Varania's quiet murmur of his name, looking down at Hawke with her lips reddened, her cheeks flushed, her dark hair caught hopelessly around his fingers, her eyes alight with hope and gladness and a silent _promise _that makes his stomach twist in dizzy anticipation and his fingers tremble as he cups her cheek one last time, he thinks—

If it takes every moment of the rest of his life, he will try.

—

Later, when the room has quieted again from the explosion of laughter and tears and the dog leaping excitedly enough to break nearly every breakable thing in the room—to Varric's vocal dismay—Fenris seats himself beside Hawke on the edge of Varric's bed. Isabela throws him a quick, proud glance before turning again to Anders beside her, his clear fatigue from their healing beginning to fade, if only a little, as she teases him. Aveline and Donnic stay only long enough to promise a later visit to them both; then they are gone with Toby's barks ringing behind them.

Merrill goes next, when the story is finished and the explanations completed, drooping nearly as badly by the end of it as Anders. Hawke embraces her fiercely, whispering something in her ear that Fenris cannot catch even so near as he sits; whatever it is it is enough to make Merrill's eyes grow damp at the corners, her head held high and proud.

"And take Anders with you," Hawke suggests. Toby flops atop her feet beside the bed, his tongue lolling happily; he licks Fenris's ankle once, then rests his heavy head on his toes. Fenris grimaces. "He looks like he's about to fall dead asleep standing up."

Isabela shakes her head, sliding smoothly from the windowsill and tucking her arm around Anders's waist. "He'll never make it," she says, and rests her chin on his shoulder. "Come sleep with me for a little while, sweet thing. I've got a bed and a pillow and everything."

"Sleep?" Anders says doubtfully.

"_Just _sleep. Unless you'd like anything more."

He shakes his head, laughing, scrubbing a tired hand over his face. "Fine. Hawke, you know where I'll be. Any signs of—_anything_, and you send someone for me, you understand?"

"Yes, ser," she says, then adds more quietly, "Anders, thank you."

"Of course." He gives a general wave as Isabela guides him out after Merrill; they hear his booted feet stumble down the narrow hallway, Isabela's low, throaty laugh—and a distant door clicks closed. Sebastian follows close behind, pausing only to clasp arms with Fenris and bemusedly receive Hawke's kiss on his cheek. She does not explain and Sebastian does not press, and after a quick, genuine smile that brightens the room as much as any benediction, he is gone with the rest.

Varric sighs, tipping back in his desk chair until its legs creak, hands toying with some bauble from his desk in his lap, staring meditatively at the ceiling. "Well," he says into the sudden quiet. "That's that, then, isn't it?"

Hawke closes her eyes, leaning without shame to rest her head on Fenris's shoulder. "Oh, Varric. Isn't that enough?"

"I don't know. It seems like a perfectly good setup for a sequel."

"_What _sequel? 'And then they all went home and slept for a hundred years without dreaming once.' The end."

His voice is deceptively mild. "I was thinking more of the new characters."

Hawke's head lifts away from Fenris's shoulder. He would mourn its loss—but Varania lifts her chin in challenge, her red hair knotted again where it belongs. Carefully, Fenris stands, freeing his foot from the dog's weight; then he crosses to his sister where she stands at the window, framed by the brilliant blue sky. "Varania."

"Leto."

He inclines his head, acknowledgement; he says, "The choice is yours."

Her eyes flicker to Hawke, to Varric at his desk, to Fenris again. "I… I would stay here. For a time, at least. I have no coin," she adds defiantly. "No home. No clothes, even. I have nothing. But I would stay here. With…with you, my brother. I would know you as you are now."

A slow warmth begins to unfurl in his chest. "Are you sure this is what you wish?"

Her eyes flash. "Do not question me."

He—he _remembers _this, remembers too that he has never triumphed over it, and when his sister scowls he laughs, inexplicably glad. "I have rooms."

"They're filthy." Hawke rises gingerly to her feet, her hand on Toby's bracing head as she crosses to them. Fenris puts a hand beneath her elbow; she looks at Varania and adds, wryly, "Just warning you."

"I've slept in gutters before. I will try it. I will see for _myself_, and no one else."

"Good," Varric says, the front feet of his chair knocking to the ground again. His eyes are very warm as he drops the trinket he'd been toying with into Fenris's hand—Danarius's pendant, the chain broken, the power snapped and gone. "Now, all three of you—go _home_."

Hawke's home, they decide at last, at least for the moment. "Not that Fenris's mansion isn't fit for visitors," Hawke explains as they ease down the stairs into the emptied main hall, the marks of battle already scoured away along with Danarius's body, Corff already behind his bar, Norah already tipping drinks into empty glasses. "But, well—it isn't fit for visitors. Yet."

Fenris snorts. "It will be."

"Will it?"

"_Yes_," he says sourly, mock-glowering at Hawke as she grins at Varania, biting back his own smile. His sister rolls his eyes and jumps as the dog noses her out of the way of a chair; then she smiles herself, stroking Toby's nose, exclaiming as he bounds forward, his hindquarters wriggling so hard in excitement at the door to the Hanged Man that he nearly upends a table.

"Do all nobles in Kirkwall own such beasts?" she asks, and across the room Norah curses at his bark.

"_No_," Fenris says, too quick; Hawke adds just as fervently, "Thank the _Maker_."

Varania laughs. And strides forward and throws open the door, allowing Toby to precede her into the square, as if she belongs there, as if she has never meant to be anywhere but this city, this _place_, her future laid out at her feet, her brother at her back. She pauses once, and looks back over her shoulder, her hair afire in the sun. She asks, "Well? Do you come with me?"

His sister. A mage—a Tevinter mage, _another _apostate to count within their circle—and his mother's hands, and eyes like his own eyes, and a memory not so faint as it was before. He meets Hawke's lifted eyebrow with his own, hardly able to fathom how they have come to this place; she shakes her head and he smiles, and though they move slowly they move _together_, towards his sister where she stands in full day, no shadow on her face.

He touches her shoulder, gently. Hawke stands on his other side, her arm linked through his own, smiling bright as sunlight. He says, "With you."

Varania stills. Then she smiles herself, not as widely but more precious for the cost of it, and she turns, and they walk together into the city.

—

end.


End file.
